by Marshall Walker Lee
Bu that was ’41. In 1937, when Agee posted his list to the folks at Guggenheim, he was awe-struck, still a Southern boy in NYC , a writer entering maturity. He was 26, the age that I am now, and despite the Great Depression, in 1937 Agee must have seen the world as almost unbearably vibrant, a great and full spirit house. Even in the depths of the Depression (in fact, it was because of the Depression), the WPA allowed artists like Agee, who used Roosevelt’s New Deal money to underwrite his trip to Alabama, to see themselves as members of a kind of populist-avant-garde, the first generation of American artists to have access not only to the remote corners of our continent (air travel and the highway systems were moving out of their respective infancies) but also to a wide variety of new technologies and media, including moving pictures and magnetic tape sound recording. The spirit of Agee’s “Plans for Work,” the full text of which I will not reproduce here in the hope that you, dear gentle reader, might seek out your own copy of Agee’s Short Prose, sees in his era’s media the seeds of a kaleidoscopic new art, one that would embrace within the body and mind of one artist a great plurality of interests and techniques.
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by Ann Marie Thornburg
In his autobiography A Man With A Camera Almendros describes the quality of North American light by way of a comparison. He writes: “In France the light is very gentle, because it is almost always filtered though the banks of clouds; this makes working with exteriors easy, since the shots are matched together with no difficulty when they are edited. On the other hand, in North America the air is more transparent and the light more violent. A figure standing against the sun appears as a silhouette.”
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by Ann Marie Thornburg
One poet who comes to mind when I think of poems that share an effortless kinship with photography—but that are always unmistakably poems, not just simple descriptions of an image in the mind’s eye that could, alone, speaks volumes—is the Frenchman Jean Follain. He was alive for three-fourths of the twentieth century, which means he witnessed much, including the two World Wars with their unending procession of tragedies that not even a superimposed historical narrative could make palatable.
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Chris Thornton and Juan Cole on Iran today (with a portfolio of photographs) … Jennifer Robertson on historical forgetting and contemporary Japanese art … Philip Beidler on Vonnegut’s Dresden … Anis Shivani on the new poetry of lament … Stories by David Huddle, Nancy Reisman, Sharon Pomerantz … Poems by Albert Goldbarth, Sam Taylor, and Beckian Fritz Goldberg …
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photoessay by Christopher Thornton
(with an introduction by Jonathan Freedman and commentary by Juan Cole)
Late last summer, longtime MQR contributor Chris Thornton sent us his “Letter from Tehran” detailing his experiences during the demonstrations that followed Iran’s stolen election, and along with it, photographs documenting all aspects of Iranian life. Both offered vivid accounts of a society whose visible contradictions—just then exploding into violence—were being played out in public and private alike. We are happy to print his piece and a selection from the photographs he sent us. And to gloss the issues involved, we called upon Michigan professor Juan Cole, one of the leading scholars of the Mideast and the Islamic world and the author of an indispensable blog, to write a commentary on some of the most striking photographs. We’re grateful to be able to print his commentary at the end of our selection from Thornton’s ensemble of images.
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