Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead

Among a collection of mounted kitchen utensils, what appears to be the scraps of a lithographic magazine advertisement remain on the wall in Walker Evans’s “Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead” (1936, gelatin silver print).  Hamlin Garland documented the practice in his collection of stories Main-Traveled Roads (1891).

Then they entered the house, into the sitting room, poor, bare, art-forsaken little room, too, with its rag carpet, its square clock, and its two or three chromos [chromolithographs] and pictures from Harper’s Weekly pinned about.

-Hamlin Garland, “The Return of a Private”

Then came again the assertive odor of stagnant air, laden with camphor; he felt the springless bed under him, and caught dimly a few soap-advertising lithographs on the walls.  He thought of his brother, in his still more inhospitable bedroom, disturbed by the child, condemned to rise at five o’clock and begin another day’s pitiless labor.

-Hamlin Garland, “Up the Coulee“

amazon unveiled

I took this screenshot of a couple months ago because I just thought it was pretty amazing to actually see some of the inner workings behind the ubiquity of Amazon placed right on its front page, which sometimes feels like nothing more than a print-on-demand operation. The image gives us a small peek into the heart of its distribution operation–a warehouse stocked with goods waiting to be shipped, in this case the Amazon Kindle.

But this momentary alignment of Amazon’s glossy, digital public face with its byzantine material reality does little to give us a sense of the corporation as a whole, a possibility which was realized even in the first decades of the 20th century to be near impossible. Brecht, upon seeing a photograph of the interior of the Krupp factory by Renger-Patzsch, said “the situation is rather complicated by the fact that less then ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works … tells us next to nothing about these institutions. The reification of human relations – the factory, say – means that they are no longer explicit. Something must in fact be built up, something artificially posed.” (qtd. in Benjamin’s Little History of Photography).

Martian Photography

As I was passing in between the range of NPR in New York and Philadelphia on the NJ Turnpike a few days back, I struggled to hear a brief interview with Jim Bell, geologist at Cornell and researcher on the Mars Rovers. I was only able to hear chopped up words interspersed with the “thats the way, I like it” song. Luckily, the interview can be found here.

Despite the report’s several bogus or grandiose claims–that landscape images of Mars are “becoming part of our collective visual vocabulary,” that one day poets will travel to Mars and be able to give us better interpretations than these photographs, that much like the way Eskimos apparently have 50 words for snow future colonists will have the same gradations for red–there was one point I liked. In the description of the interviewer’s experience of viewing a Martian landscape, she says, “Actually there’s nothing in this picture that isn’t rock and shadow; and because there are no trees or anything else connected to life, I have no idea how big or far away anything is. The sense of scale is a complete mystery.”

Space, spatiality, and distance continue even here to be critical in discussions of Mars. Looking at some of these photographs here and here, it’s as if the images challenge us to construct our own sense of scale, to imagine a place in or experience of not only the image but the spatiality that Mars provokes.