[URBAN NOTE] Photos at Osgoode

Two of the Toronto Photography Festival's public installations can be found right now at the Osgoode TTC station on the corner of University and Queen. I see them every morning as I head to work, and every evening as I return.

On the west side of the station wall are mounted the fourteen photos in the Russian avantAES+F Group's Suspects: Seven Sinners and Seven Righteous, a series of portraits of seven average teenage girls attending Moscow-area high schools and seven teenage murderers held in Moscow-area reformatories. The fourteen girls all look likle typical teenage girls, wearing lipstick or not, wearing Chicago Bulls sweatshirts or not, smiling or not. None of the girls' identies--student or killer?--are revealed. That's left for the viewers to guess.

On the east side of the station wall are mounted the fifteen portraits of James Mollison's James and Other Apes. These photos are entirely conventional portrait photos but for the fact that the subjects are non-human primates: gorillas, orangutans, bonobos, chimpanzees. These faces clearly aren't the faces of human beings, but they're close enough, and the way that the subjects look back at the viewer through the medium of the photography strongly suggests that some qualities of mind bind our species together. Would that we recognized that before we pushed them to the edge of extinction.

[BRIEF NOTE] On Di

This Daily Mail story suggests that the hysteria over the death of Princess Diana in a car crash back in September of 1997 hasn't dissipated yet. And Al-Fayed is still on about the conspiracies? Please.

I have to say that I much prefer the argument that Diana, as descendant of the Merovingian dynasty founded by Jesus, was ritually murdered by the Anglo-Dutch banking conspiracies in retaliation for her refusal to marry Bill Clinton, a dissident faction of MI-5 arranging her death (it must be noted) at the Pont de l'Alma which occupies so as to allow her to ascend to a higher spiritual plane in death. That's an entire alternative worldview. The above story is just silly in comparison.

[BRIEF NOTE] Playing With Nazis

After reading Gitta Sereny's account of meeting brilliant Nazi-era filmmaker and post-war photographer Leni Riefenstahl in the former's book The Healing Wound, I was inspired to read up about her. I'm indebted to the author(s) of the Wikipedia article on Riefenstahl for linking to an online copy Susan Sontag's 1974 essay "Fascinating Fascism". After dissecting her collaboration with the Nazi regime and examining the aesthetics of her photography of the Nuba people of south Sudan, the late great Sontag concludes that the rehabilitation of Riefenstahl--ongoing in the 1970s, closer to achievement now in the early 21st century after her death--poses a threat to humanity's moral conscience.

Riefenstahl's current de‑Nazification and vindication as indomitable priestess of the beautiful—as a filmmaker and, now, as a photographer—do not augur well for the keenness of current abilities to detect the fascist longings in our midst. Riefenstahl is hardly the usual sort of aesthete or anthropological romantic. The force of her work being precisely in the continuity of its political and aesthetic ideas, what is interesting is that this was once seen so much more clearly than it seems to be now, when people claim to be drawn to Riefenstahl's images for their beauty of composition. Without a historical perspective, such connoisseurship prepares the way for a curiously absentminded acceptance of propaganda for all sorts of destructive feelings—feelings whose implications people are refusing to take seriously. Somewhere, of course, everyone knows that more than beauty is at stake in art like Riefenstahl's. And so people hedge their bets—admiring this kind of art, for its undoubted beauty, and patronizing it, for its sanctimonious promotion of the beautiful. Backing up the solemn choosy formalist appreciations lies a larger reserve of appreciation, the sensibility of camp, which is unfettered by the scruples of high seriousness: and the modern sensibility relies on continuing trade‑offs between the formalist approach and camp taste.

In related news, three copies of Gavriel D. Rosenfeld's new book The World Hitler Never Made have arrived at work. This title is a fascinating study of Nazi-related alternate histories in fiction. Rosenfeld's thesis is that the spread of postmodernism, increasing historical distance, growing awareness of the implications of modern physics (particularly the many-worlds metaphor of quantum mechanics), and the relaxation of existential tensions produced by the end of the Cold War. He suggests that there is a trend for alternate histories to treat the implications of a Nazi victory in the Second World War--the completion of the Final Solution, the literal enslavement of central and eastern Europe, horrors likely unthought of elsewhere in the world--lightly, as material fit for light speculation and gaming. We are no longer, Rosenfeld suggests, as aware of the moral enormity of the Nazis' crimes as we were in the generation following their defeat. This gives us added perspective on other crimes, but it also (he argues) leaves us ignorant of the sheer shock.