Collusion, Pride and Lies: Miss Evers' Boys at The Ripple This Weekend

by John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

Miss Evers tells her patient some kind of truth.

Just how much should you tell someone about the pain before they get their first spinal tap at the hands of an inexperienced doctor?

Would you tell them less if they were an illiterate farmer? How smart is the stupid man? That man we look down upon, what is his life worth?

Miss Evers' Boys, a play about the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, challenges audiences with some timeless questions about the value of the life of a man when his contemporaries might count his life as worthless or expendable.

The play is set in the deep South, long before the Civil Rights Era. There's evident racism. We see the Tuskegee experiments happening. We know that since then, many societal changes have occurred. The play is not a news flash. We've heard of these events.

Yet, those events are the foundation for presenting some ancient problems and conflicts. We see arrogant people, full of themselves and selfish, doing what they think is good, manipulating others to death.

Miss Evers, is she a protagonist coming to grips with a struggle? What's her tough choice? Or, is she a villain and appeaser, who ignores and excuses the corrosion of humanity that's thrust in front of her face every day?

So Happy to Receive Their Treatments

If a man risks his life to conserve yours, is it right to pay him little if he begins the race to save you by being poor? How close to the trash pile should we bury someone who is expendable? How much are our lives worth if we choose to treat someone else as an experimental animal?

How are we lied to, to death?

Miss Evers' Boys explores the story of some poor black farmers from Macon, Alabama, who were given not just experimental, but placebo, treatments as they suffered from syphilis.

Perhaps we forget just how destructive and lethal syphilis has been. It's the pain, the mortality and the horror of slow decay unto death that Destiny reminds us of in this history play.

There's some dark humor in there. Watch for men with syphilis flirting with nurses. Do we notice? The flirting or the syphilis?

If we heard someone with a sexually transmitted and lethal disease flirting with a nurse, but we gave that disease and that man who had it a name that was more in contemporary vogue: would we notice this flirting more?

Did we forget the value of life because it was past due or unfashionable? Ask yourself: what dominates these scenes? Men being men, or men carrying the pall of lethal disease?

How much have we forgotten about syphilis and how we treat the diseased? Do we just rationally dismiss their natural desires and normal feelings with our conclusion that they are doomed to die?

Pride and Options.

In one scene we hear the pride of naming this great scientific study. Destiny shows the academic gloss given to professional hubris. Meanwhile, the welfare of the men in the study goes unaddressed beyond the most meagre compensation.

Three generations after slavery, has the poorest made a step up?

Have they progressed far? In the play we see the poor black farmer not considered completely worthless: he merited being buried next to, not in the pile of, the community's trash.

One step away from trash. His corpse given a thrifty burial in a reused sack. Was mankind as fair to these men as it was to others?

How high, how noble, must a man's birth be, in the eyes of his contemporaries, before we owe him the respect of candid truth?

Destiny Theater Company shows Miss Evers' Boys in honor of Black History Month at the Ripple Theater on Brainerd Road. The Ripple is a few doors down from The Comedy Catch. Tickets are $16; performances on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

http://www.destinyentertainment.org/

Chattanooga, Tennessee.

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Photographing John McLeod's Point of Departure at Covenant College

"Primitive Aggression" with its grain and shadows.

Pan F+ 32ASA, Green 58, Bulb one minute.

By John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

Hydroquinone moves like a flash fire across the highlights.

When I got there, to the gallery,

I knew that one of my main ideas would involve portraying these delicate shadows cast upon the gallery walls from the track lighting. Those delicate shadows needed to be strong, contributing elements in order to hold up in the role as subjects of the photographs.

This called for severe contrast compression and long exposures.

Severe compression to get the range down to a few tones; and, long exposures in order to render those few tones as blacks and whites, not just a few soft grays.

That is, we want the tones compressed into a few forms of gray; yet, we want those grays to be distinctly different. Overall, there is a severe expansion throughout the whole contrast scheme, but within each of the available tones, there is strong compression.

A few, diverse, tones build the photos. Those tones will make the shadows their own tone, even if it is at the cost of greatly flattening and compressing the tones which show the forms of the sculpture.

Heavy blocking contrast filtration to put local colors into tonal groups to which they would not ordinarily belong; followed by long exposures to light and chemical energy to re-expand those groups into diverse tones which would still yield the subject's support (shadows on the wall) tones as middle gray.

Heavy filtration & long exposures.

It needs severe contrast compression because I knew I wanted those shadows to be a strong contributing element to the photograph. The contrast range of the sculptures themselves was much wider than the range of the shadows. The shadows had two, maybe three, tones in the gallery.

The lighting for the shadows was delicate. This called for the longer exposures to burn them in. If a more normal exposure and contrast scheme had been used, then the delicate shadows would be a delicate detail of the final photograph.

"Orbit" and its shadows.

Ilford Delta 3200 at 1000ASA, Green 58,

Bulb one minute. VCII print at 90 seconds.

I didn't want someone hunting for the subject. I wanted those shadows to be a part of the photo, the main part, the subject.

Why?

The sculptures are in this gallery. Those shadows on the wall are part of the sculptures' presence. It's part of they're being there. The shadows on the wall are a part of the exhibit. The shadows were specific to the exhibit and the lighting there.

If the sculptures had been photographed elsewhere, those same shadow patterns would not be there. Showing the shadows was part of showing the exhibit.

This called for a very harsh contrast and exposure pattern. Heavy filtration before camera and in printing. Hard moving developers during negative and print processing.

Almost all of the photos were made with a Green 58 filter. Bulb exposures a minute long were common. Print times, too, often came in at a minute or more.

There were two other influencing factors:

I had photographed some of the sculptures, in color, with ringlight before. This had yielded rounded, largely shadowless, color forms.

I had spent the night before baking some negatives of a test strip for six hours, and was in a flavor of falling in love with long development times. The test strips had been left standing for about six hours.

Like another roll I had done recently, the films for this session were all developed for 30 minutes, regardless of film type. This yields hard, dense negatives. It provides the compressed contrast range. In the higher speed roll (Ilford Delta 3200), it yields very strong grain.

There were a few photos in which I wanted to achieve a silhouetting effect for part of the photo, but still wanted to reveal some contours and textures of the wood.

For those, I switched over from the contrasting green filter to a CC85C, an orange filter, which would emphasize the tone of the wood by matching its local color.

Since I still wanted to achieve a strong silhouetting effect, the rest of the contrast and exposure schemes for the photos remained the same.

These pictures, too, had a lot to do with the sculptures and their environment. Again, it was a play of local lighting and shadows.

Nails of a small Fury, its shadows, and the tone and texture of surrounding sculptures.

Ilford Pan F+, CC85C, Bulb exposure.

Nails of the small Fury and The Shield.

Pan F+ 32 ASA, CC85C as orange contrast filter,

allowance for drop in exposure as tungsten for film

sensitivity to non-daylight exposures (even in black and white); bulb exposure of one minute.

This photo was made while looking through The Furies. It uses the tall wood forms to create the stripes of tonal patterns that form the verticals in the photo. The silhouette and the curved form of The Shield are a break in this pattern. They also have a different grouping of tones. Compositionally, it's a break in two kinds of pattern.

While the flavor of these compositions is strong, I have little worry over them. We're scheduled to photograph The Shield and The Furies by themselves in early March. So, I have confidence in these more radical compositions because I know that before and after they were made, there were and are other chances to make different types of photos.

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References:

John McLeod's exhibit, "Point of Departure" at Covenant College.

www.johnmcleod.net

Concept Sketches: Preparing to Photograph John McLeod's "Point of Departure"

by John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

Taking a small risk, I'll go ahead and show some of my concept sketches for an upcoming photo session at Covenant College, which is proudly featuring John McLeod's "Point of Departure" sculpture show in its library gallery.

McLeod had an opening last week; a big success. We had a chance to see the sculptures in the gallery; and, John got a chance to speak to an audience of college students. The presentation was coordinated by Jeffrey Morton, Associate Professor of Art at Covenant.

Covenant College is hosting McLeod's show for a little while longer; and, we've made arrangements to photograph it in situ.

That's Ivy League talk for "on location."

If you ever get a chance to photograph a sculptor's work, I recommend it. Thanks to some advance coordination, we have some great objects for our photographs' topics; and, they're already staged in a great location. Time to get ready to make some photographs.

Here's where the concept sketches come in.

Normally, I usually make a few diagrams and some lists for myself. Of the sketches that I made for this session, the most complex overhead diagram would be a big part of my functional planning for heading on out there.

It reminds me of what I want to photograph, how I want to set up; and, because the sketches and lists can be reviewed after I make them, they can be used to generate a reasonable inventory of equipment to bring along.

Just sitting down to think things through from the standpoint of visualization can really support the photo session's planning.

Before I started planning, a few things happened:

• I saw some of the sculptures before they got there, so I already had some rough ideas
• I coordinated with McLeod and the College to arrange the photo session
• I visited the gallery opening, with an eye for what I might want to photograph later

Process-wise, this covers a lot of before-camera work:

• Topic familiarity & research
• Interpersonal coordination
• Location visits
• Visualization of compositions

With those basic points in mind, I was able to draw up these concept sketches.

A copy of the concept sketches is available as a PDF file (1.3 MB). Click here.

After the session is over, and the pictures are in, we'll see how I did. In the meanwhile, I'll be able to proceed with more confidence because I have spent some time planning. Particularly, planning with respect to the design of the photos.

It's the composition ideas that drive the other steps, like what equipment to bring and how we want to process and display those images later. I know that equipment list is sexy; but, let's remember that the photographing is about making photos.

I'll provide an update once the photos are in.

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The Dynamic Power of the Starving Artist: Art, Innovation and Saving the Economy

By John O'Keefe-Odom
AgXphoto.info

Commentary

Watching Meet the Press the other day, I noticed former Secretary Henry Paulson and Alan Greenspan talking about economic innovation.

"Innovation," Greenspan said, "by definition, is not forecastable."

They've got a point. Most economic forecasts are based on what has happened in the past, and what's known about what's going on at the time a prediction is being made. If something has never happened before, how can an economist or businessman predict how well it's going to do?

Which brings us to art.

Yes, art. Art, in my view, as actually a specialized form of manufacturing. We usually have either one person making an artifact, or one artifact being made by a group of people. Each artifact is different. Each one doesn't have a good precedent in the marketplace for its value.

Make something nice and try to put a price tag on it. What's it worth? It seems at first like that might be a simple matter, but after we study the problem for a while, we can see that the answer may not be so easy. The artifact is rarely worth just the sum of its materials and labor. What's worse, if it's not holding up well under scrutiny, it may actually be worth less than what it cost to make it.

There's an arbitrary characteristic to art pricing, but the item made is an example of traditional wealth.

Investors seemed to be hitting on this back before the housing bubble. For a while there, more and more fine art was selling well. Rich people were using them as investments. Admittedly, it was the Big Name art that was moving for outrageous prices. Yet, as a normal commodity, the value of art is somewhere between what the buyer was willing to pay and what the maker was willing to spend on it.

I mention this because we're in a slump. Big time. You may have noticed.

One of the first things "Hank" Paulson said about this in that interview was that we don't know where the innovation is going to come from.

Well, we can see where it hasn't come from so far. Let's take a look at some of that:

The Economic Stimulus Programs. Not to knock 'em, but I don't know anyone who has been hired as a result of these. I have seen one, count 'em one, job advertisement in my local area that was specifically listed as an economic stimulus package job. It's great that there's one available for somebody, but that doesn't counteract the current or past problems.

Past problems like, hundreds of people laid off before the rich people started losing money on the housing market. By rich people, I mean primarily, large investment banks which are not looking much better than upper class versions of casinos right now.

I haven't checked the odds, but at the observed rate of losses, we might have been better off playing blackjack with the money. Who knows.

When the large investment banks started taking heavy losses, trickle down economics kicked in fast. Trickle down economics does work. It seems to be at its most efficient when it comes to passing the buck on paying the bills.

We sometimes say the trickle down effect doesn't work; but, that's primarily when we're discussing the benefit of profits at large. When it comes to losses, it's a rocket ride to the bottom floor.

The stimulus plans simply haven't been able to counteract this. They may be able to cushion it somewhat; but, if The Tooth Fairy did show up with a million bucks tomorrow, minimum wage would go up to a million and a half per hour.

It's just human nature. It's the negative side of what should be, in a balanced market, a healthy form of greed and progress. Greed can be good; it can keep us going. Who doesn't like reward? Too much of it, or too little of it, can be destructive. A stimulus plan won't help us if it's not joined to the concept of noblesse oblige.

The wealthy can help. They can do good, and be noble. Right now, though, many of them look like they are disregarding the whole situation, or are scared, or are interested in exploiting their workers by pressuring them even more. Overall, no big life preserver on the horizon from the upper classes of politics or finance.

I recognize this point strongly because I have received patronage from an important local arts grant program. However, I can't reasonably suppose that such a program, in and of itself, could be effectively mimicked on a wide scale. We'd need such help on a wide scale. Like, lots of cash falling from the sky.

The Existing Surviving Businesses. God help anyone who has kept their day job through all this because have a look at what kind of anxiety just got hitched to the pressure people were under before. They were already doing quite a bit of work as it was; now, many appear to be afraid to lose that work that they have.

Just how anxious? Look at their behavior. It's socio-pathic. I know that's strong: yet, have a look at it. Need an example? Brace for impact. Here it comes:

"Thank you for choosing ___ [Business Name]."

We have otherwise intelligent, full-grown adults who will say this to us every time we walk into that room. Give it a test. See how many retail outlets in your area make their employees do this.

It's crazy behavior.

It's a widespread crazy behavior, which implies we've got a lot of people who think it's now normal to parrot platitudes as part of normal commerce. 95% of the speakers are probably just saying whatever they have to say to keep their jobs. Yet, who is the financial whiz who believes that polite platitudes figure into economic success, when applied with this breadth and intensity?

We've got the Law of Supply and Demand. Is there a Law of Polite Platitudes to Profit? If there is, we may be inching up on one of its limiting factors: it makes people look crazy and anxious.

Keep in mind, I don't mean someone who says this as a part of normal conversation. Someone somewhere might genuinely mean it. Okay. More power to them.

Thank You for Choosing Insanity

I mean we've got people saying this 200 times a day, even when no speaking at all would be a normal part of human interactions.

Thank you for choosing ____. Thank you for choosing ____. Thank you for choosing ____.

It's corrosive to normal social relationships, and if it happened in any other setting for any other reason, you would probably think that person was crazy.

If you had a roommate who told you, "Thank you for choosing Apartment B-12," every time you walked through the den, after about six hours, you'd want to evict the guy. What kind of crazy person acts this way? And does obsessive amounts of work? People afraid to lose their jobs.

Okay, now, it's not just the craziness of the anxiety that these people are manifesting which makes them an unlikely source of economic recovery. It's the nature of the work that they're doing. Namely: assumption of social stress.

That's right. We don't labor much anymore, do we? We do have some people who labor for a living. We do have some people who refine goods and provide services for a living. Yet, even among those who provide services, and increasingly large portion of the population is not concentrating on the material matter of providing the good or service. Instead, they are employed, at least in part, for the assumption of social stress associated with making that sale.

These people are getting paid to be punching bags.

This doesn't mean that they're getting actively beat up or abused on a day-to-day basis. It does happen, but most of the social stress they're assuming is not a direct assault on them, most of the time. Instead, what they're having to do a lot of is disguise the sale.

Disguising the problems of the sale, even if it is passively disguising it, may make for a happier customer, but it does not increase wealth. At least not when a majority of the economic system involved is about the disguising, the assumption of social stress related to the transactions.

The traditional wealth of the community is still made the same old way: refinement or making of goods and the providing of services.

The disguise jobs are about refining the provision of services. It's another degree removed from traditional wealth. It can help a company that's doing okay do better. Yet, it cannot make something out of nothing.

Making something out of nothing is a point worth concentrating on right now because we don't have a whole lot of cards in our hand. We're low on options. We have to make some options.

Best way to make some options is to make some stuff. Art.

From the perspective of traditional wealth generation, the gambling that Wall Street was doing doesn't make any wealth. It doesn't create anything. It may inflate the cost of something or devalue spending power, but in and of itself, it doesn't make any goods or provide any services. At best, it may refine the providing of services, but that's back to the disguise jobs.

It's our own fault. We let them do whatever they wanted for a long time. Things got out of balance. They went crazy with it; and, we let 'em. Now we have a big crash, and there's an imbalance problem.

What to do about it? Make art.

Economic Leaders Quibbling With Us

Meanwhile, Mister Greenspan went on to say that the recession is over.

Okay, I checked right away. I noticed immediately that nothing seemed to radically improve as he spoke those words. I looked around; I had the same problems I had before he started talking.

If Mr. Greenspan is right, and the recession is over, why aren't things better?

Brace for impact, because here it comes again:

Greenspan was quibbling. Quibbling? That sounds somewhat diminutive. What's quibbling?

Quibbling is when someone tells you a selective truth. Particularly, when someone tells such a narrowly limited, specific, truth for the purpose of skewing an overall judgement and persuading others.

Army Officers have been admonished to avoid quibbling ever since General MacArthur took control of West Point. While I'm not a big MacArthur fan, he was right about quibbling. In military occupations, quibbling can cause some catastrophic failures; in business it happens all the time, and is normally only an inconvenience.

Yet, Mr. Greenspan's quibbling on Meet the Press is actually some really, really bad news.

The Recession, to people like Mr. Greenspan, is a recess. It's a break in activity; normally, profitable activity. They stopped making profits, so they think, and were eventually forced to admit, that we were in a recession.

A Great Recession, judging by its social impact. We have yet to have anyone adequately explain to us where all these evicted and foreclosed-upon people have gone. After about six hours, they're going to start to want access to another building.

I didn't hear about a big Free Foreclosed-upon Hotel for these people to move into. I imagine it would be about the size of Nebraska, if it existed.

For normal people, "The Recession" as a phrase means bankrupt, economic hell. To businessmen, a recession means a state of taking a break from profits. Uh-oh. We're not speaking the same language. And, the leaders of business are not speaking a language that even begins to imply that they have any interest in doing anything but making profits for themselves. We've got to get the whole town out of the slump. Making profits for the leaders is not, by itself, good enough.

So, Recess is over, for our investment gamblers. What does that mean?

Well, dramatic ethical overhaul didn't seem to be on the top of their to-do list before, and it doesn't seem to be now. So, if their recess is over, and their profits have resumed, and there have been no major changes, just what are they up to?

The same stuff that got us in this mess, all over again.

In which case Mr. Greenspan's statement, "The recession is over," is not real good news. It is, instead, a dramatic and horrifying warning that we are making the situation worse, not better. If we are doing the same bad stuff that we were doing before, and all of that just got lots of people thrown out of their jobs and evicted, doing more of that is some real bad news!

Companies are profitable again, right? All of those laid off people didn't get brought back, did they? No. They're still out of work. Those foreclosed properties did not magically fill up overnight with successful and strong businesses.

So, we have the same set of aggressive and negative conditions, but we're forcing profit out of it again. This is real bad news. It implies fragility. It's like a broken beam that was pressed before, but which is now being stretched: some of the flavor of the force might have changed, but it's still a broken part that's being used under great strain.

Yet, We Have the Tools to Save Ourselves

Meanwhile, we don't see any increase in the good stuff that will help us to power through the tough times.

You can tell me all about invest in this or invest in that, but artists know: we've got two main tools at our disposal: the toolbox and small savings. That's it.

Everyone's willing to help us if we have another $1000 to spend. Not much to blame about there, but that only goes so far: like, until you run out of thousands. What's left is the toolbox.

And, okay, here's the blessing:

Using the toolbox is something you can do without Wall Street's blessing.

You don't need someone big to descend from the heavens and fix all of your problems if there is something you can fix or do yourself. Chances are, there's something you can do or make with what you have already on hand which is just as good as what anyone else would do or make. Maybe better.

Do that. Make that.

You yourself won't save your community this way. Look around. How many other people are just like yourself, with respect to those making capabilities? Everyone has their own talents, of course; but, look at who can make something. Pretty much everyone can.

It's not going to turn Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution into a good idea for America, but it could sustain an arts revolution in your hometown which can keep something moving.

What looked worthless before, that starving artist's work, is traditional wealth. Nationally, we need to build up that traditional wealth base as much as possible as part of fixing our way out of this mess.

You don't have to be a fine artist. You don't have to be a great artist. If you are a doer or a maker, you are an artist. Create some traditional wealth. Make something. Sell something. Buy local art. Sell local art. Don't wait on a rescue.

If you'll excuse me, I have to fix up some photo fixer.

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References:

Meet the Press Transcript: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35270673/ns/meet_the_press/page/3/

Rifkin, Jeremy. The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. Putnam, 1995. ISBN 0-87477-824-7.

Fixing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"

By John O'Keefe-Odom

AgXphoto.info

Political Commentary

As a veteran of the US Army, in light of the recent Presidential attention to the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy regarding homosexuality in the US military, I would like to offer these points for consideration:

With the President's statement in the State of the Union address that it's time to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the military will be motivated to make some changes to their laws. Hopefully, those changes will modify the Uniform Code of Military Justice's punitive articles to set policy square with the law.

In the past, and today, we're burdened with Presidential directives on the matter of homosexuals in the military which are perceived to be at odds with the letter of the UCMJ. If it were to be modified, and if I were to advise anyone interested in modifying it, I would ask that these three points be kept in mind:

1. Create A Comprehensive Sexual Battery Law. A quick look at the UCMJ's few pages on Sodomy and Rape shows that the current law is not only out of step with contemporary sexual standards, but also unfair across genders.

No one should be the victim of sexual battery. An over-arching article, preventing and punishing sexual battery should be created. Regardless of the mechanics of how a sexual assault is carried out, sexual battery is not only a physical crime but a psychological manipulation of the victim. It's more than ordinary battery. It deserves its own over-arching legal control regardless of the sexuality or genders of those involved.

2. Applicability. Specifically, the law should be focused on sexual conduct not only within ranks, but also between those within the military and those not in the military. While the homosexuality policy seems to lead our focus on how Soldiers might have sex with one another, the punitive articles also protect against sexual misconduct in theater. As the existing laws are reviewed, new laws should not be put in place which would rescind that aspect of punitive control.

The Rape and Sodomy punitive articles, as they exist now, not only govern how Soldiers behave amongst themselves, but also how they behave among others. This should continue, in order to prevent and punish sexual crimes on the battlefield.

3. Administrative Timeliness and Fairness. The law should not be retroactive, or in any way overturn a standard which would rescind or negate an a punitive action already underway or completed. Soldiers should be held to the standards which were in place at the time that they engaged in an action they may have been punished for. Just as it would be unfair to retroactively punish someone, so also it would be unfair to grant clemency or reward to someone based on a later change in standards.

Since the examination of the current policy may apply not only to the UCMJ, but also to other regulations and policies, policies which would be affected by a change to the UCMJ should be identified and also adjusted accordingly. That is, there should not be an administrative policy in place which contradicts the UCMJ. So, not only should the UCMJ concerns be addressed, as above, but also policies respecting the entrance to service ("chaptering in"), exit from service ("chaptering out") and standards for fitness while in service (any medical fitness standards not immediately related to healthy consensual sexual conduct).

If those three points were followed as a limiting paradigm, it's more likely that any changes to the policy which would be proposed would be more likely to be fair, free of religious and social bias, and durable.

From Baptist to Buddhist, if we build the policy to be fair and equitable, and free from apparent hypocrisy, the Soldiers will be more effectively led by the law. Contradictory policies only cloud the moral issues the UCMJ should clarify in war.

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