Hire the Old Guys

 

So I am the least hire-able thing in America right now:  A straight, white, older male. I can't do much about any of that, but I can argue one point: Older.

Y'all should hire the old guys (and I use "guys" generically -- it applies to women too, probably even more so). You should hire us because, well, first of all, we have been doing what we've been doing for a while. We should have it figured out, right? I mean, work smarter not harder? And even if you're hiring us to do something we aren't currently doing, we've gotten good at figuring things out. After all, we weren't born into the internet age, but we just answered your email, so ...

But it's bigger than all that, because this is the larger point: We've already done stupid. The old guys have done all the dumb things younger people do, and discovered it's a bad idea. We know that drinking all night and missing work is a bad idea. We know not reading the instructions and just faking it is a bad idea. We know that ignoring the guy who has done the job for 10 years and thinking we know better is a really bad idea. Because we've been that other guy.

So hire the old guys. You'll thank me later.

What's Wrong with Photojournalism?

Saw this today on Instagram, and it struck at something that has been troubling me for some time.

leica_camera #LOBA 2020 – Shortlist #2

_Cristina de Middel_ (@Lademiddel)
In her on-going project, Journey to the Center, the Spanish photographer (born 1975) makes reference to the surreal atmosphere and symbolism of the similarly titled novel by Jules Verne, as a way to present the current Central American migration route, through Mexico, as a daring and heroic journey. Documentation and fiction blend to create a multi-layered narrative.
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So, to start with, the Oskar Barnack Award is Leica's to give however they want. Unlike, say, the World Press Awards or POY or the Pulitzer, it doesn't have to do anything to represent the meaning or intent of photojournalism. It is whatever they say it is.

And who am I to say what Photojournalism (with a capital P) should be? Just another smart aleck with an opinion. So, with that out of the way ...

This is a prime example of really good artistic BS. The project "makes reference to the surreal atmosphere and symbolism" of Jules Verne, and "documentation and fiction blend to create a multi-layered narrative." What the F**k does that mean, exactly? Specifically: "Documentary and fiction blend?!" Isn't that when it ceases to be photojournalism?

I'm still looking as I write this, but the site for the Barnack award doesn't seem to have a page that simply states what it is, but they do have a page full of comments from the important people (all for more important that me) who nominate photographers and choose winners. They use words like "engaged photojournalism" and "contemporary reportage photography." These are words that, as an old school news photographer, make me nervous. These are the kind of big words that people use to hide their real meaning.

A Short Aside

It seems that every young journalist, photographer and writer, as well as the industry generally, goes through a phase now and again when they worry that they're not getting at the Truth. You know, the Truth with a capital T, the truth that just saying what happened doesn't seem to fully embrace. It's the Truth of what's really going on, that you, now that you've been on the ground and become the instant expert you're trained to become, now fully understand. Simply saying that this person did this, that person said that, this odd thing happened ... well, it just doesn't capture what it all means. People won't be made to fully understand, we need to do something more.

Often, the solution offered is to do more, like offer personal thoughts and impressions or better, different information, perhaps to blend in some fiction to, you know, make it more True. In other words, manipulate reality, make stuff up, lie. But to get closer to The Truth.

Back to My Point

Until Photoshop, changing up things in photography required a great deal of skill and effort, unless you staged things. (And staging things was fairly common and accepted back in the day; you don't want to know about some of your favorite, famous old LIFE magazine photos.) Staging has in modern times been frowned upon, unless of course you're making a portrait, for example, or maybe organizing something to get at the Truth.

And this brings me back to Cristina de Mideel's really nice photos. What she's done is cool, and interesting, and probably a subject that should be addressed (although it seems to me we have heard a lot about the struggle of immigration to the US, but that's a separate question). However, is it photojournalism? Is it even documentary photography? Is that little bit of fiction a toxic touch?

It reminds me of Alessio Mamo. He made pictures of Indians next to tables of luxurious, though fake, food to demonstrate their hunger. There was outrage when he posted some to the World Press Photo Instagram page. I, for one, was puzzled.

Wasn't this an example of advocacy journalism? Wasn't it an effort at "engaged photojournalism?" Wasn't he trying to dramatically demonstrate the Truth, using a little fiction?

This Is Nothing New, Really ...

I have written publicly on this sort of question before, for News Photographer magazine, covering questions about whether prizes were going to photographers covering the same sort of things over and over. And lately, there has been a bit of a backlash from old school photographers like David Burnett about a number of things from the Pulitzers (he wrote on Facebook about his frustration of the current tendency to award the prize to teams and staffs) to the controversial NPPA Bill of Photographers Rights (which contains criticism of the CIS gender male white gaze and suggests subjects give consent before being photographed, to oversimplify). I think this is a piece of the whole.

And of course, W. Eugene Smith's stories have met their share of criticism, Robert Capa's famous "Death of a Spanish Soldier" has long faced doubts, and as for seeking The Truth, Robert's brother Cornell formed the whole International Center for Photography as a place for the "concerned photographer." The search for the right way to portray The Truth is an old one.

But, honestly, I really wish we would just agree that news photography and photojournalism, though it involves choices as to what to photograph, not to mention a range of technical choices, should be about capturing what happens as it happens. No fiction, no big, fancy artsy words required.

Masque of the Red Death

I have taken to rereading Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities.

It seemed to be the thing to do in a time when we've elected a New York real estate mogul, one who sees himself as a Master of the Universe, as president, a time when we seem to reflexively treat the stock market as the economy (it isn't), a time when politics seem to exist only at the extreme fringes, and so on. In that way, I haven't been disappointed.

As an aside (my real point is upcoming), I wanted to look at Wolfe's writing. For those who don't remember (or weren't alive yet), the novel was written in monthly installments published in Rolling Stone magazine. Wolfe, always able to cause conversation, had decided that the great novels describing society and its times had died in the era since Thackeray, Zola, and Dickens. "Wolfe crashed into a literary scene that had grown timid, self-absorbed and, yes, dull," a Washington Post profile said in 2018. "Our brilliant young writers, he claimed, were afraid to capture the dazzling variety and absurd clashes of real life."

I had read it after it came out in book form and thought it good, with some reservations. I could see where Wolfe the wordsmith would become fascinated with an image or phrase, circling around and repeating it, then dropping it later as he did next month's installment. The same seemed true of characters, like the Ed Koch-like mayor of New York, who opens the book and then fades from view as the protagonist, bond trader Sherman McCoy takes center stage. But I would be a fool not to respect and admire (and occasionally imitate) the immortal talents and style of Wolfe, and I was searching for learning from a master.

Wolfe hits his stride a few chapters in, but I just finished reading one that seemed so to speak to today: Chapter 15, "The Masque of the Red Death," a 30-page description of McCoy's agonizing night at a posh social event among the elite of New York's social and business scene. On the way home, McCoy's socially conscious wife is unusually upbeat and chatty. Wolfe describes her evaluation of the party: "With a pretense of amused detachment, she burbled about the shrewdness with which Inez had chosen her celebrity all-stars: three titles (Baron Hochswald, Lord Gutt, and Lord Buffing), one ranking politician with a cosmopolitan cachet (Jacques Prudhomme), two designers (Ronald Vine and Barbara Cornagglia), three V.I.F.'s -- 'V.I.F.'s?' asked Sherman -- 'Very Important Fags,' said Judy, 'that's what everybody calls them' ..." and so on.

One of those V.I.F.'s, also a title, Lord Buffing, is an English poet who another guest tells McCoy is not just gay, but suffering from AIDs, the plague of the 1980s. In its day, more mysterious than COVID-19 ever was if not as contagious, it held the terror that leprosy carried in its time. No one knew what it was or how it was transmitted.

Buffing interrupts the party with a short speech when he is recognized by the host, and instead of a short, humorous thanks, he digresses into a meditation on Edgar Allen Poe's "Masque of the Red Death," a story about a Prince Prospero hosting a hedonistic two-year party behind locked palace doors to avoid a plague, only to be struck down in the most indulgent room by a mysterious guest dressed as Death.

"So Poe was kind enough to write the ending for us more than a hundred years ago," the ailing poet says to the silenced room. "Knowing that, who can possibly write all the sunnier passages that should come before? Not I, not I. The sickness -- the nausea -- the pitiless pain -- have ceased with the fever that maddened my brain -- with the fever called 'Living' -- those were among the last words he wrote ... No ... I cannot be the epic poet you deserve. I am too old and far too tired, too weary of the fever called 'Living,' and I value your company too much, your company and the whirl, the whirl, the whirl."

The jolly, self-indulgent crowd is brought down with a thump, silent after an evening of being a "noisy hive." "The intruder the [hosting] Bavardages dreaded most, silence, now commanded the room."

Before First World Problems became a hashtag (or there were hashtags), the ailing poet challenged the Prosperos of New York, locked in their penthouse palaces, safely buffered by the income disparities between them and those living in the Bronx. Wolfe is setting up the fall of the mighty McCoy at the hands of those he thinks beneath him, but he's also looking at that lurking monster, AIDs, still dangerously misunderstood before a certain Dr. Fauci led the effort to identify the virus that causes it and bring treatments.

The parallels and echoes to our time are hard to miss.

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

--Karl Marx 

I Am Ozymandias, King of Kings

Recently, I've been fascinated by the Shelley poem "Ozymandias."

I mean, most well-educated people can pull out the operative line to make the point of megalomania: "I am Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" But only a few who have survived something resembling a classical education can pull the whole poem from memory, including me.

So while doing a sound check, requiring one to run on and on in order to provide continuous speech to check levels, I regretted that I had never memorized some epic poem for the occasion, and "Ozymandias" came to mind.

I looked it up that evening, and printed the text. It's far from epic in length, just 14 lines, so I set out to make up for lost time and memorize it.

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

 The task proved easier than expected. The first dozen or so lines came quite easily and quickly, though for some reason I am now struggling with the last two. However, that's not what struck me most.

David Roberts, Fragments of the Great Colossi (of Rameses II), 

at the Memnonium (Ramesseum), 1838

First, though I am late to the party, I am so amazed at the quality of the writing. Each word has its place, and each is perfectly chosen. I think that's what made memorization so easy: only that word, that phrase could follow the last. No other one would do.

But then the structure became apparent. From my angle as a TV reporter, I realized it's a perfect television news story, spinning out its information in a catchy way before the big reveal.

Writing news for TV is unlike a lot of other journalism. Usually one is taught the newspaper, inverted pyramid method: Important information up front, secondary data next, fill details following. So a story goes: So-and-so was murdered today in Chicago. (The lede, with the most important facts) He was at a party with friends at a car repair shop when gunmen entered and killed the group. (More data that was not so critical) And so on. Not getting that critical fact up front is know as "Burying the lede."

TV, especially a feature story, is more of a storytelling medium. The information is doled out in easily comprehended pieces, one after the other, so that the viewer doesn't lose his place. In the words of my journalism professor -- not forgotten after 35 years -- the viewer can't go back a page to figure out a reference. You have to write so it makes sense that one time it flies by.

So let's look at Ozymandias as a feature piece for TV.

For one thing, because it's poetry, the line breaks are in different places than they would be for a script. So let's rearrange Shelley (accompanied by the horrified screams of English teachers everywhere).

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—

“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. . . . 

Near them, on the sand, half sunk 

a shattered visage lies, 

whose frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

tell that its sculptor well those passions read, which yet survive,

stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. 

Round the decay of that colossal Wreck, 

boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Ok. Now try reading it as a narrative voice over with the returns being where one is tempted to pause.

The opening line sets the scene. I love the choice of "antique land," especially as my mind kept jumping to a more cliched "ancient land." Antique is such a better word, carrying so much more baggage. 

But why this open at all? Can't we just jump into the facts? Two reasons:

1. It sets it as a story, not a scene.

2. More to my point (that this is a great TV story): Reporting is almost never contemporaneous (much as we would like it to be). Usually, we're showing up after the fact and trying to put together what happened. Most all of journalism is "who said." 

And then we get the descriptor of facts and scene. TV stories, I think, are told like a good bar story, laying out the facts bit by bit to build a structure, or laying them out like a triumphant display or the cards of a winning poker hand: one at a time building to the finish. So we get it here: two legs, but no body, made of stone, standing in the desert. Next to them a face, broken from the statue. But not just broken, a "shattered visage." How much better? A total image in just two words.

Then both character and a summary of how well sculpted was the image, capturing the subject so well that his passions yet survive in the stone ("stamped on these lifeless things," again, how much packed into five words). 

Finally, the big reveal: "Nothing beside remains."

Boom.

The rest is an easy set down for the listener (viewer), re-enforcing the image gently: boundless and bare, lone and level sands to the horizon.

All that remains is the sig out.

It only runs around 40 to 50 seconds as a straight read, and there is no sound or nat pops, so there's that. But what a simple, tight, perfectly told tale.

Is There Really No Master Plan?

I always jokingly answer conspiracy theories of the Trilateral Commission or DaVinci Code or alien autopsy ilk by saying: "I wish it worked that well." While, from the distant outside one can spin up deep state organization ideas based on an elaborate arrangement of certain facts aided by fantasies, once you go inside and see how it works, you realize that they -- be it government or business or media -- are like the rest of us, just making it up as they go along.

Well, I guess I too have succumbed in a small way to belief in some hidden, greater knowledge and power. In my case, it was Warren Buffet's continuing purchase of small market newspapers. Why, I wondered, would he do it? This, after all, is the Wizard of Omaha, the man who made billions on his savvy business sense. While everyone else was beginning to arrange the funeral for newspapers, why would he invest so heavily in them? Surely he knows something we don't.

Now, Bloomburg has a piece suggesting ... well, that they wish it worked so well. They seem to think he's just emotionally attached to the idea of a local paper. No ambitious scheme, like Jeff Bezos seems to have for The Washington Post, no deep understanding of something the rest of us don't see, just fond memories of being a paperboy.

Now I'll just have to go back to awaiting a miraculous salvation ...

Addendum

Apparently I'm not the only one who has thought of this:

"In the words of the Joker in 'The Dark Knight,' 'Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plan is horrifying.' But what if there is no plan? What if everybody is just bad at everything? What if the adults who run the most important institutions in the country were the children who picked their noses and put the boogers under the desks in school?"

As I Was Saying ...

Some time ago, I posted a comment on CNN having a hissy over the Trump administration making the daily briefing not for camera. They cried that it was a closing off of access for the public, and in a bit of theatrics hired a courtroom artist to come in and draw the briefing. Been there, done that.

Well, the dramatics on both sides have only escalated (though the briefing seems to be open for broadcast again), with now the spat playing out for our collective ... entertainment?

But my point here is Todd Purdum, who was apparently covering the White House right around the time I was, has finally articulated well the concerns I have been forming over the more recent efforts by the press, and CNN's Jim Acosta particularly, in confronting the administration.

Photo by Wilfredo Lee

But as a secondary note, let me add: Where were you guys?

Press aides in the Clinton administration regularly flat out lied to us, and often over ridiculously minor things. It was part of the back and forth, and we took it in stride without making it a challenge to democracy. I'm sure those who covered George W Bush have similar stories, and it takes little effort (even while avoiding alt-right conspiracy sites) to find questionable Obama actions and statements. Yet it lacked the melodrama we see today.

Is the Trump administration a leap beyond? Perhaps. Should journalists rigorously challenge authority and demand their questions be heard? Absolutely. But where were you guys all those years before someone so obvious showed up?

I Think We've Been Ruined by Television

Odd thing for a guy who works in TV to say, especially as I also think we've had some of the best entertainment TV produced lately since the medium began. (And I'm not alone in that.) But that may very well be the problem.

I think the problem is twofold: The "Star Trek" problem and the "House of Cards" problem.

The "Star Trek" Problem

 

In the 1950s and 1960s, everything seemed to be looking up.The reach out of the atmosphere was on everyone's mind, from the 1957 shock of Sputnik to the 1969 landing on the moon. One can place this all in the context of superpower competition, but let's stick with popular interest. Even "Toy Story 2" centered its main plotline on the public's fascination with things space.

The 1960s also brought space drama to TV with shows like "Lost in Space" and "Star Trek." Even comedies like "I Dream of Genie" had a space subtext. Then it faded with the counterculture, Vietnam War protest, and the feeling that reaching to the stars was somehow indulgent with so many problems on Earth. Science Fiction would not regain its popularity for a decade, with the arrival of the space fantasy of "Star Wars" (which had a counterculture element to carry its plot, but let's not get distracted).

"Star Wars" brought, along with a renewed interest in science fiction programming and the accompanying profits, the start of a great leap forward in special effects, leading to a computer graphics revolution making not just space drama but earthly adventures have SFX scenes that were indistinguishable from reality, as well as making a revived "Star Trek" financially practical.

And all this brings me at last to my main point: now that we have all seen on television -- through "Star Trek," "Battlestar Galactica," "Babylon Five," and any number of other shows, reboots, and revivals -- the sights of the universe and a few fantastic versions of it, we are left with the emotional impression that we have all been there and done that.

As Mercury and Gemini entered orbit, we had some early movie visions of what Earth orbit looked like, but we had never really seen it before. And as for landing on the moon, Hollywood gave us "Destination Moon," written by the respectable Robert Heinlein and backed by real science. But it looked like this in 1950:

 By 1969, we knew it looked like this:

And indeed, now the special effects wizards have real images of Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, and so on, not to mention spectacular Hubble telescope imagery of distant stars and nebulae.

So now, our science fiction, even the minimally science-based stuff like "Star Trek" and "Star Wars," looks more real than ever. Thus, I think, somewhere back in our subconscious, back in that part that makes us want to go places and see things, we feel no need to go to space. We feel like we have already been there.

The "House of Cards" Problem

I wish I had a better example for this, but I believe the Netflix version of "House of Cards" is the most applicable. (I much prefer the deliciously malicious British original version, but moving on ...)

Politics now is in chaos, with previously understood standards kicked aside at regular intervals. During the 2016 campaign, Trump campaign aides met with a Russian lawyer offering "dirt" on the Hillary Clinton campaign. What exactly this means legally remains to be established, but let me go on.

As part of the investigation into Russian election meddling, congressional committee chairman Devin Nunes said he had come to the White House to see secret evidence, only to be so embarrassed by the clumsy circumstances and statements around the event that he eventually had to step back from his committee's work.

Having grown up in Washington, watching the Watergate scandal progress as I was in middle and high school as the wily Sam Ervin ("I'm just a simple country lawyer") slowly worked his select committee, watching able parliamentarians like West Virginia's Robert Byrd and petty tyrants like House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills (finally brought down by a drunken escapade with a stripper) and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Tower (served cold karma by his former colleagues when rejected the post of Secretary of Defense), this all seems like the blundering, ham-handed work of amateurs.

And I think it is. The Trump campaign is a prime example.

Organized and mostly run by Trump and his business associates, bringing in politically experienced professionals now and again, but always under their control and often fired arbitrarily, depending on the atmosphere of the moment, the campaign lacked any real foundational feel for politics, either how it is done on the campaign trail or in practice in government. Public revulsion over politics-as-it-is in America made this very appealing, but it also made the campaign then and governance now the amateur hour, reeling from crisis to crisis.

I think the core to understanding this is "House of Cards." The cynical fantasy of "how Washington really works," based on the even more cynical British approach, is like most political drama exaggerated to the point of fantasy. But these people think that's how it really works, and thus thought it unremarkable, if not expected, to take a meeting with representatives of a foreign government offering "dirt" on a political opponent, and then to be disappointed when there was nothing to offer. Not that long ago, a much less egregious dirty trick resulted in the FBI being called in ... by those who would have benefited!

The same could be said of Congressman Nunes, seeing himself as a real-life Frank Underwood, quietly maneuvering his allies and opponents like a spider pulling the threads of his web, headed off to secret meetings revealing dark truths. Real life is both not that interesting and much more complicated.

It's enough to make one wish for the days of Richard Nixon, a man who had spent decades in politics learning the dirty tricks then far more prevalent than now, until he too fell for playing his hand too broadly in changing times. But at least he knew what he was doing.