STARBUCKS COFFEE
By George Porcari
The photograph reveals only a single grotesque or comic moment, I thought, not the person as he really was more or less all his life. The photograph is a perverse and treacherous falsification. Every photograph — whoever took it, whoever is pictured in it — is a gross violation of human dignity, a monstrous falsification of nature, a base insult to humanity.
Thomas Bernhard
"Extinction"
There are only two forces that can carry light to all corners of the globe, the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here.
Mark Twain
The six color pictures are so generic and ubiquitous that they are almost invisible. The 16"X20" photographs illustrate various stages in the cultivation of coffee. One particular picture holds me: A dark skinned man in the middle of a blazing hot day stands in a sea of coffee beans that goes back to the horizon; he is leaning forward against sacks of beans that reach up to his torso, he looks at the camera grimacing. I am reminded of Sharon Lockhart’s photographic series of ten color photographs: A dark skinned woman carefully holding various kinds of fruit with her left hand. She looks at the camera, at times with a slight smile, acknowledging the camera, the pose. But then so does the man with the coffee beans in the Starbuck’s picture. Why is one picture in a coffee shop and another in an art gallery? This photography of the worker, the poor, the dying and the dead is often called the "photography of concern" with emphatic promotional emphasis by the Magnum photography agency and by Aperture magazine. We habitually see these pictures in news-magazines, or attached to letters asking for money or as illustrations to articles about a catastrophe. In Starbucks’ decorative pictures or Lockhart’s photographs we can not – without falling into over-simplification – refer to them as part of the "photography of concern". They have both carefully placed themselves outside of this context, yet they un-mistakably reference it. Why? Where is the difference, where can I find it, and once found how do I talk about it?
Werner Bischof is one of the great photographers of the 20th century, and one of the founders of the Magnum agency, hence one of the creators of the photography of concern. This is Bischof writing to his wife, from Lima Peru. April 26th, 1954: "I am a stranger in this city, I sensed it yesterday as I walked through the streets towards Mount San Cristobal, from where one has that fantastic view right to the sea. I passed these miserable mud huts, which are almost indistinguishable from the slums of Hong Kong – as in Mexico, depressing poverty at every turn. The Far East was so beautiful by comparison! I often think of it. I also think a lot about my great plans, the equipment – whether there really is any point to all this effort and expense for the very few shots that might be interesting." Bischof would be dead in three weeks and his impression of that city, where I was born and raised, and in particular his doubts about those "very few shots" are, I think, very moving. Bischof’s career began, as so many other photographers then and now, as a painter, then quickly to the School of Applied Arts in Zurich, studying with Hans Finsler, one of the pioneers of Neue Fotografie. Influenced by surrealism, constructivism and cinema Neue Fotografie fostered talents as wide ranging as Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Matter. It’s more minor efforts now look like impersonal exercises in a design class. Bischof described his work this way: "Tender maple leaves as if chased in silver, the silky coat of cats, shadow plays projected on to the back of a nude model, details of lawns, seed-capsules, and shells and snail shells again and again." His work appeared for the first time in Du magazine December 1941. His editor at Du: "In many a discussion we requested or suggested more pictures of people. But he had to overcome a certain reserve" In 1946 he publishes his first book: 24 Photos. The first 23 photographs of that book present the best of his early work for Du which he described so succinctly himself. The last photograph was taken in a refugee camp in Ticino, Italy in 1945. It’s a close up of a refugee child behind a metal bowl. Du refused to publish it. He would continue to take this kind of picture for the rest of his life, until his death in Peru in 1954.
The kind of formalism in the Starbucks photograph follows conventions that are now a commonplace of cafe and restaurant decoration. Stock photography. Student stuff. Everyone learns it in art schools. This kind of photography comes from the late 19th and the early 20th century; when it was old enough to be given a name it was called Pictorialism. In that long ago when it was new, advocates of Pictorialism wished to disassociate themselves from amateur snap-shot photography because it seemed to them to lack refined feelings. The snapshot’s "arbitrary" framing of a fleeting, ambiguous moment was as upsetting as Impressionism had been two generations earlier, and for the much the same reasons. To achieve their effects the Pictorialists mimicked the romantic (out of focus) styles then (and now!) in fashion. Its European origins were in the Art-for-Art’s-Sake aesthetic. Those origins are not irrelevant, as Formalism derives its aesthetic from the same source. That is it privileges light, color, texture, abstract forms and their interplay within a frame as an independent and complete sign system. "Art" is, for Pictorialists and Formalists, a "pure" thing, uncontaminated by messy "reality" For Pictorialism photographs were a means to feelings (of a refined sort), and for Formalists pictures would be a means to ideas (of a refined sort). The photography of concern would consciously and conscientiously go in the opposite direction. To paraphrase Sartre it would get its hands dirty.
The term "documentary photography", in the late 19th century originally denoted someone who photographed documents, manuscripts and artwork. It wasn’t used for the first known photographers in America who made documentary photography, or what we would now call the photography of concern: Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. They referred to their own work as "illustrations". Hine worked for the National Child Labor Committee. His work was to illustrate, literally, the need to reform child labor practices. Riis wanted his photographs to be a visual equivalent of the ugliness he saw in poverty and to provoke the disgust it made him feel. He wrote that the first glass plates that he took, of a mass grave for paupers in New York "was so dark…as to be almost hopeless" But that "the very blackness of my picture proved later on, when I came to use it with a magic lantern…it added a gloom to the show more realistic than any art of professional skill might attain". The pictures had to be as absolutely guileless and authentic as was possible. If people thought that the pictures were false in any way, they would not be moved to action. In short Riis and Hine equated aesthetics with fakery — therefore to get to the "truth" about a subject aesthetics, as they understood it, must be avoided. What happened subsequently, of course, is that the work of Riis and Hine became an aesthetic that signified "authenticity". This style quickly calcified into metaphor, becoming — at a glance — the "photography of the disenfranchised" or "the photography of concern". Subsequently, the photographers of the following generation would synthesize the ideas in these "illustrations" of Riis and Hine with the current aesthetic ideas fashionable at the moment: Pictorialism, Formalism, Surrealism, Pop, Conceptual Art. Photographers would emphasize one or another "school" depending of the temperament of the photographer. Or as was more often the case the same photographer would adapt one mode or another depending on the contingencies of the moment, and the tastes of their client. The editors, or curators, would sort it all out later. It is just like that today — but so what? How does this help me to understand these pictures in Starbucks? I have some questions here as I wait for my Grande Latte (my second today!) that are a bit more practical: Why would a coffee shop need to show pictures of people harvesting coffee anyway? In the eleven years that I lived in Peru I never saw anything of the sort in any cafe in any part of Latin America (where the stuff is actually grown); in fact they would be more likely to have a picture of a pretty girl on a beach.
It makes sense to me that, when the time came for Americans to make their own version of the European cafe they would create a sanitized corporate environment. This is after all where they feel most comfortable – and that’s extremely important in the creation of a successful social space. For those who do not know, Starbucks brought to the general American population the pleasures of European style cafes — more or less. And there’s the rub. In Starbucks every square inch of space has been thought out, as a problem, and has been solved as a concept. The wallpaper, done in green, gold and brown, depicts various seals, words and fragments of official documents evoking not a particular history, but rather the more general "historical"; the ceiling has exposed electrical conduits and air conditioning ducts painted in matte black. Everything is shown, everything is out in the open – a Puritan’s dream. The lights hanging from the ceiling, also painted black, refer to fifties modernist design and to purely utilitarian warehouse fixtures without being either. The lighting at eye level is closer to the domestic teardrop light, but retains a corporate touch: the long black metal tube that suspends it from the high ceiling; the wiring wraps around the tube, both exposing the wire and turning it into a decorative element. The Formica is maroon and dark green, complimented by black and gold. The effect is that of a space meant to connect an administrative space with client space. It is an architecture that has been around for many years in airports – the architecture of transition. The music that is piped in — most often jazz and world music — feels as if it had lost whatever reasons there once were to create it; it all becomes elevator music whatever its origins or its value in the culture that produced it. The furniture is a truly masterful touch: it references domestic furniture, but is too big and solid; corporate furniture, but is too comfortable; public transit furniture but is too delicate; it is perfectly balanced between stations. In short every surface, every shape, every color, every sound at Starbucks is there not only to serve a function but to express a concept. (Is there a public space in America in the year 2003 that is not conceptual in some way?) What is this concept? That this transition of corporate to domestic, administrative to work-space, past to present is possible without physical effort of any kind, it is something that one is just "in" — and this homogenization of space and time is comforting. If this space is as conceptual as I think, the photographs must in some way participate in these ideas. How so?
Bischof again: "Then the war came and with it the destruction of my "ivory tower". My attention focused henceforth on the face of human suffering. I saw this a thousand times over: stranded people waiting for days and weeks behind barbed wire; children and old people – behind them exploding grenades and speeding armored cars. I was driven to get to know the real face of the world." There must also be a false face – was this his previous work? He is sent to document the effects of the war for Schweizer Spende, a Swiss relief organization. In that year he travels to Vienna, Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Mainz, Essen, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Aachen, Hanover, Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, Monte Casino, Naples, Tuscany and Athens! This breakneck speed of traveling that Bischof develops in 1946 – what does it do to a mind? Are the effects something that we can see in his work? This is the speed of contemporary photojournalism, or perhaps of traveler’s everywhere with a camera covering their face like a mask. Albert Einstein called them (photographers) "light monkey’s". A publisher cancels the publication of a book to have been called "A Book of European Photographs". The book would have depicted, in the words of the publisher’s press release: "People and their behavior in the present chaos". Instead he took pictures of the Acropolis in Athens. Bischof comments: "Bread-and-butter work, very unsatisfactory, but the Americans will love it, even Du stoops to that. That’s what people like". Of course, it still is exactly like that. Bischof travels in 1946 through a landscape that has been so devastated that a publisher decides to issue a book about "people and their behavior in the present chaos". The pseudo-scientific detachment feels contemporary and eerie. The book is eventually cancelled perhaps for the obvious reason: who would be there to buy it? He is offered a contract with Life magazine but nothing comes of it. In the summer of 1947 he and his girlfriend Rosli Mandel are re-united in Rimini, Fellini’s hometown, re-created in Amarcord .
What is at work in Starbucks is a drama. There is a narrative with a beginning a middle and an end. Here we get more to the heart of the problem, and why the photography of concern would be asked to play a role in this drama of Starbucks’ and the production of coffee. Let’s look closer. The photographs are in a corner, three on each side. I see that the pictures on the left depict raw coffee beans, the ones in the middle it’s harvesting and processing using up-to-the-minute machinery, and the ones on the right the familiar whole coffee beans for sale at Starbucks. There are human beings in only two of the six pictures. The process, as shown, is of course immaculately clean and orderly. Now this is very funny. If anyone has ever been to an actual coffee growing area, such as Iquitos in Peru, the first things one sees are massive amounts dust and human sweat intermingled with coffee beans and loud, dirty, oily machines that are always breaking down; children pissing, prostitutes waiting, patrones screaming…very un-Sarbucks. That the photographs would ignore this reality is normal enough, but why the people? What part are they asked to play? Why does the man look into the camera and grimace? Because he has no power and he has no money. Good reasons! Significantly the only workers shown are at rest in their pictures. To show them working, in the manner of Sebastian Salgado’s brilliant photographs of workers, would create interesting (and for that reason undesirable) links. First between one sort of work (picking coffee) and another (making drinks in Starbuckcs) and then between those and what we do – all of us standing in line here waiting for our coffee – for me: librarian. The laborer is a part of this landscape of coffee, he is a part of its very "nature". The laborers, like Millet’s Gleaners have always been here and they will always be here. History is referenced and put on hold at the same time. The laborers are not so much invisible as transparent — a part of the overall design within the frame — the "human interest". The male is on the left and the females on the right. Production and fertility are also equated — the bean as seed. Lockharts’ pictures are too smart to fall into such categorical strategies. They also have no desire to be invisible, they are to be seen in art galleries after all. But the woman posing with the fruit – what is she? Do we go from beans to fruit? Is it a new version of Carmen Miranda? Is it Betrayed by Rita Hayworth all over again? No, there is more at stake than that.
The picture magazines dominate visual communication in the 1940’s. Felix H. Man, Alfred Eisenstaedt and Umbo (the first photographer to make images that closely resemble film stills), work for Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung the model for Life Magazine; Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and "Chim" sell their work through their own agency, Magnum; Rodchenko and El Lissitsky, the greatest photographers of their generation in Russia, work for Building the USSR, Bill Brandt works for Illustrated and Picture Post in England; and John Heartfield for Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung. Television had made its tentative entrance but was still a medium with an uncertain future, often referred to as a fad. The great photographer Eve Arnold describes that transition from the picture magazines to television with great charm in her autobiography. Moholy-Nagy, who worked with the Worker’s Photographers’ Movement (of which Heartfield was a member) expressed some concerns. Moholy-Nagy: "…there is great danger that demonstrating unmistakably the potential of photographic means will cause an unintended crisis in photographic work in the near future. There will be ‘recipes’ to produce ‘beautiful pictures’ without difficulty. What matters, however, is not that photography should become an art in the conventional sense (Steiglitz’s hope) but the great social responsibility of the photographer, who uses the elementary photogrpahic means at his disposal to produce a work that could not be created by any other means. This work must be the undistorted document of contemporary reality". This did not mean, of course, that the photographer was "objective", or would pretend to be without aesthetic means, in the manner of Riis. On the contrary. That’s where it gets more complicated. Moholy continues: "The aim must be to express the motif in its most succinct and convincing form. If this requires a distorted perspective, then it is because the end has justified the means. But the end is not in the material things themselves, nor in the work of art." If the end is not in the material things themselves (Realism), nor in the work of art (Pictorialism) where is it? The answer is to be found, of course, in Moholy’s own photographs in which all of the strategies at the artist’s disposal are in play, orchestrated to express his feelings for the present. For Moholy-Nagy bourgeois pictures and their theories claimed some sort of objectivity, whereas writers like Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer negated this idea and stood it on its head. The photographer would serve his or her own preferences, interests and pleasures – but with the aim of finding the "truth" by looking for it with a camera. The "form" for each picture, in such a case, would always be changing, always being dictated by what the photographer saw: the content. There would be a kind of dance or improvisation between photographer and subject and the image would be the result of this meeting. Mistakes would, of necessity, be constant, since every situation is, in the literal sense a new one. This was the aesthetic logic of the photography of concern. Yet the results were more often than not disappointing. Kracauer on the picture magazines: "There has never been a age that knows so little about itself. In the hands of the ruling class, picture magazines as an institution are one of the most powerful means of striking against cognition." Bischof’s first job for Magnum is on a hospital in London. He buys a copy of the documentary film director Robert Flaherty’s autobiography. He thinks of giving up photography to direct documentary films. He travels to India for Magnum then to Verona, Capri, Sardinia – ‘Le Piazze d’Italia’. Next stop Peru; he didn’t know it, but this was his farewell to Europe.
Both the Starbucks image and Lockhart’s picture celebrate the human gaze but the gaze itself is not allowed to act. It is frozen. It is made to mean. It is as controlled as an advertising image. The political load of these images is strong and near the surface, and the context, which might bring the political to the surface, is always relegated to the level of aesthetics. Formal properties frame the gaze and hold it in check. They are both very sharp images, everything is very clean and very clear, there are no contradictions. The full complexity and unease of human contact is absent because the images are without depth, there is nothing beyond the frame but what is being illustrated. In the text of Teatro Amazonas, the catalog of that body or work we read about Lockhart’s pictures: ""For with the permission of an "objective" gaze, she does what she has so often done, which is to fuse it with a gaze of affection." The gaze of affection. Bischof saw this gaze too, describing the Indians of Cuzco as "selling themselves to tourists as postcard subjects". That gaze is not true because it is sentimental, essentialist and illustrative. It has no history, no present, it exists in abstract space. It is ideal for philosophical rhetoric because it is a Platonic image. It states the fact of poverty, without providing any context for it other than the "picturesque" — it states the fact of a poor individual looking at a very expensive piece of camera equipment as something invisible or casual, when in fact it can never be either. Under the assumed innocence of the subject the image presumes to unveil the universality behind the cultural — and economic — gap between photographer and subject and subject and viewer. But in fact is anything unveiled?. This is the gaze of a National Geographic cover (October 1950) titled Peru: Homeland to the Warlike Inca. The look means much the same: This is "humanity in its natural state" — this is "pathos". It is the "de-politicized speech" of which Barthes wrote when he described the black soldier on the cover of Paris Match in Myth Today. I know that look too — I come from Latin America and lived there twelve years. It’s the look of a servant for a patrona if there is the possibility of being paid "well". That smile has a terrible history and the photograph willfully ignores it because it can’t face this woman. It eliminates complexity and contradiction in the exchange and gives us "the postcard subject" that Bischoff saw in 1954. (To see this smile in all of its contradictions you can read Vargas Llossa’s Conversation in the Cathedral) The woman supplies to this myth a "historical reality" and what myth gives back, as Barthes explains in the same essay, is a "natural" image of this reality. In the Starbucks pictures and Lockhart’s series in Brazil the individuals pictured have been turned into statues that signify. This is why the images in the coffee shop and in the gallery suggest the photography of concern without being it. In Starbucks the two women and the man are there to illustrate the "drama" of a-historical coffee production, in Lockhart’s picture, the "drama" of the a-historical gaze. The images that we can characterize as the photography of concern illustrate the particularities of human suffering and disaster as it is being lived once more turning them into an epithet of "natural" inevitability: a-historical suffering. One can say "it goes without saying" that this suffering is eternal for here it is again! At it’s worst, in the photography of concern, the simplicity of an essence organizes the world for us and reduces it to a clich�.
In September, 1953, Bischof boards the Liberte in Le Havre and sets sail for New York. He begins to regain some of his faith in photography by visiting the Museum of Modern Art: "It still amazes me every time I enter MOMA and see that photography is the only truthful art form, the only one that relates directly to people". It still is exactly like that. Later he describes the border between Texas and Mexico: "Two worlds meet here…a not-so-grand Rio Grande divide the Americans from the Latinos. This unexpected abrupt transition makes the way of life of the two peoples appear particularly extreme to me. Here the supermarket and affluence, but also uniformity and sterility — there the plazas, the corso and the little fruit stands, skillfully piled high…we try to avoid the tourist sights and often spend the night in villages and haciendas. On April 26th, 1954 he turned 38 in a hotel in Lima. "On Friday I’m going into the Andes, into the mountains, the jungle, and to unknown people. Only for about eight days so I can learn a little more about the Peruvian world." On Sunday the 16th the station wagon in which he is a passenger plunges into a gorge. Bischof and his two companions on the trip are killed. Some of the images he took were subsequently compiled in a now classic book called From Incas to Indios published in 1956. The book was finished by Pierre Verger and a young Swiss colleague named Robert Frank. That sentence resonates: "to unknown people…so I can learn a little more about the Peruvian world". That is the world in which I grew up, seeing it over a period of years, slowly, rather than at his speed — the speed of a photojournalist. Yet I recognize the images in a way that I do not with the work of others. In contrast to the precisely calculated illustrations of most photojournalism, then and now, there is an enigmatic poetry. They are records of a place and a time that has passed — true enough – they are also evocative metaphors for the human condition as such — certainly — but there is more. The people in them are allowed to "speak" for themselves and what they say is often not very pretty, in fact it is often not even intelligible but Bischof let’s them be. He does nothing really — almost nothing.
© George Porcari 2003
Wener Bischof 1916-1954 His Life and Work
Marco Bischof and Rene Burri
Thames & Hudson 1990
W. Eugene Smith and the Photographic Essay
Glenn G. Willumson
Cambridge University Press 1992
Bystander: A History of Street Photography
Colin Westerbeck, Joel Meyerowitz
Thames & Hudson 1994
Sharon Lockhart: Teatro Amazonas
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Rotterdam 1999
Mythologies
Roland Barthes
Jonathan Cape Ltd. 1972
from Editions du Seuil 1957
From Incas to Indios
Werner Bischof, Robert Frank, Pierre Verger
Robert Delpire, Paris
Universe Books, New York 1956
