The Artist and Debt, Annie Leibovitz Images and Nightmares

The Repo-man knocks at the door. “Let me in Let me in”! Not by the hair of my Chinnie Chin Chin is Annie’s reply to Art Capital Group. Today the old wolf at the door nightmare torments one of the most gifted artists in America; Photographer Annie Leibovitz who made a deal with a Company of Wolves with the hope of saving her home, her life’s work and her family.

Annie owes Art Capital Group 24 Million Dollars. To secure her 24 million dollar loan she used her real estate, her art collection and the rights to her artwork as collateral. Why she needed, such a large loan is at the heart of a story in the New York Times written by Allen Salkin about Leibovitz’s struggle with Taxes, Real Estate and Debt Management.

For Annie Leibovitz, a Fuzzy Financial Picture NYTIMES July31, 2009 by Allen Salkin.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/fashion/02annie.html?_r=1&ref=business

Annie’s struggle with debt was compounded by the recent deaths in the past five years of her long time partner Susan Sontag, the writer and her Father and Mother.  She also has children and recently added two giving birth to twins. At the same time of all of her personal issues, Leibovitz was managing the renovation of her three Greenwich Village properties, which alone was a source of enormous personal stress, controversy and a major financial impact on her personal fortune.

Who is Annie Leibovitz and how did she become a character in a nightmarish bedtime story?  In the beginning of her career Annie was I think simply in the right place at the right time combined with a genius talent to capture life on film. She became the staff Photographer for Rolling Stone Magazine when Rolling Stone was just another hopeful grassroots publication. Annie’s images dominated the cover with inside images of Rock and Rolls Greatest Artists. Her images sold copy and many believe were the catapult for the success for Rolling Stone Magazine. Along with fame came fortune and opportunity. Annie signed with Vanity Fair for a seven-figure salary estimated to be 3 million dollars a year with millions more in expenses for outrageously fantastic photo shoots where she made many of her trademark images. Annie was living the Artists dream of endless opportunity and budget to create her work.

Along the way, though she partied too much and developed a pattern of financial mismanagement. Just because a person is, an artistic genius does not make them good with money or debt management. Leibovitz’s ability to make money through her work offset her inability to manage money and debt until now.

Now is another moment of being in the right place but at the wrong time. Before Annie went to the Art Capital Group, who by the way is best described as a high end Pawnshop for the art worlds, Top Artist’s, Collector’s and Dealer’s, she arranged to sell limited portfolios of her work through the auction house Phillips de Pury. The auction that might have bailed her out fell short of the mark when the Art Bubble Burst in October of 2008. That left Annie in a real bind. She had spent millions on the renovations of her New York property and had to buy out a neighbor because of a lawsuit that added several million dollars to the cost. Then the taxman rang and wanted 1.5 million in taxes. With the economy and the art, market is shambles the wolf offered a deal that Annie gambled would save her.

Learn more about Art Capital Group and how it works.

That Old Master? It’s at the Pawnshop NYTIMES by Allen Salkin

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/arts/design/24artloans.html?fta=y

The fact remains that Annie Leibovitz has tremendous earning power and she may yet overcome this nightmare. Her photographic negative archive held by Getty Images is alone estimated to be worth 50 million dollars. That is why Art Capital is so aggressively after the rights to her images.

In fact, Annie still has time to pay them back because full repayment isn’t due until September 8^th, 2009. Never mind that fact Art Capital isn’t waiting they have filed several lawsuits against Leibovitz with the most recent this past week to gain access to her assets now. The prior suit was dismissed in part was to stop Annie from working for Getty Images because Art Capital alleged that it would make it more difficult for them to sell her Archive if she was working for Getty. The court ruled against Art Capital Group.

You may be saying to yourself that this story is outrageous and that Leibovitz is unique, but not so. In fact, in a city like New York where a one-bedroom apartment can cost a million plus she is in the small time real-estate market. When you combine renovation costs in New York City with the cost of property it is easy to spend a lot more money that you bargained for. I am sure that when Annie started this adventure the sky seemed to be the limit in the Art Market until the bust of 2008. Combined with the downfall of the economy and tight lending by banks Art Capital Group was in a great position to reap a profit.

Art Capital Group http://www.artcapitalgroup.com/Questions.html

The real enemy in this story is DEBT! Debt is the ball and chain that has hobbled Annie and it will do the same to you as an Artist. In fact, debt will stop you faster than a speeding bullet from achieving success as an artist.

Many artists are finished before they even get started because of debt. Yes, those student loans will sink you faster than the Titanic. You will find that the nice banker isn’t so nice and will tie you up in knots that you will struggle against for 20 years or more.

Even if you have overcome that obstacle and have achieved success, you still maybe burdened with the debt of a mortgage, car loan, credit cards and studio expenses like rent. All of the debt most American have, and when the economy goes south you still got that debt to pay back.

If this isn’t the reason most artists never make it; it has to be a close second and I don’t know what the first is. One thing I know for sure you as an Artist need to manage your money and debt in the most conservative way possible. Never count your chickens before they hatch. Pay as you go as far as you possibly can. And for god sake live in the Mid-West or Western States and stay off the coasts. New York City may be the Art Hub of the world but visit don’t buy.

You also need to understand contracts and the results of signing contracts not only with lenders but with galleries and dealers. If you don’t understand contracts then find someone who does like a lawyer so you can root out any fine print in the deal before you commit. You also need to use contracts when you are hired to do work or sell work so that your rights and the rights of the buyer or employer are clearly spelled out. What are the terms of ownership and who owns the rights to the image, painting or whatever?

The business of art is complex as is the business of money and they are equally the same. While your vision as an artist may be limited to your creative, genius the business of your art is all about the money and wolves are not endangered in the Art World environment.

Debt is food for the wolf and the wolf is always hungry and eager to make a profit or a meal out of your mistakes. Regardless of how outrageous your creative ideas are, keep your financial ideas conservative. The fact is most of us have to have steady paying jobs of some sort to just enjoy the basics in life, homes, cars, children. If you can limit your debt, you will in the long run enjoy more freedom to create your art.

If your lucky enough to make a lot of money spend wisely and pay cash when you can, never incur debt you absolutely do not have too. I know this isn’t what we have been taught but unless you want to be a slave shed the ball and chain of debt or better yet never let them shackle you to begin with. If you have to make a deal to get what you want be sure to very carefully weigh the all of the possible outcomes, good, bad and ugly. Is the risk worth the possible payoff?

I guess the other side of the story is as artists we all like the live on the edge. Risk seems to feed our creative nature. Somehow, we need to keep the benefits of life on the edge and maintain some control over our financial security. When economic times like today come the balance is tipped and we are, always going to have days like these sooner or later. Therefore, we have to plan for the reality while we are creating the impossible dream.

As for Annie, I am confident she will emerge from this crisis and continue to be successful. Art Capital will continue to find wholesome meals and Annie will earn more money in the next year than most of us will earn in our lifetime even after the wolves feed. She will also earn some profound lessons and they will serve her well as will the lesson of her bedtime story. When the Wolf came a Knocking.

OBEY I am not a Crook, digital montage by David Eubank

A very well written article by Steven Heller on the Art of Shepard Fairey and the controversy of the transformative factor in art and copyright law.

Long live Dada!

Shepard Fairey is not a Crook, by Steven Heller

!! READ THIS !!

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Back of the Yards Mitchell Siporin 1938

I am always looking for exciting Art Websites and the Luce Foundation Center for American Art is a good one.

•  The center has a light box program that you can view its 3500 Artworks. You can even create your own personal collection, your favorites.

The Website is not as good as going to the Luce Center, which occupies three floors in the west wing of the Smithsonian, but if you cannot get to Washington, it is a close second.

The center is an open storage program that exhibits or openly stores artworks from the Smithsonian’s American Collection. That in its self is a great idea and gives you and me access to parts of the National Collection that would otherwise be locked away in traditional storage.

 The Website creates access to the collection beyond the walls of the museum and is a great resource on American Art.

•  Luce Foundation Center for American Art

http://americanart.si.edu/luce/index.cfm

Orginal Manny Garcia Photo with Faireys Hope Poster

The Question?

Can you the artist use, transform a copyrighted image in whole or part into a new work of art without permission of the original author.

That is a question that Shepard Fairey is about to answer.

Boy this guy Fairey is really mixing it up, with his recent arrest for graffiti in Boston and what I believe is a very important law suit in New York. The Associated Press wants credit and payment for Fairey’s Obama Hope image. They contend that Fairey violated Copyright Law when he used a photograph taken by Manny Garcia to create his famous poster of Hope.

I have written a lot about Shepard Fairey recently because his work in general is tied to a history in art that is of great personal interest to me. His work is connection to political propaganda and the Dada movement. And I think he does a good job as a image maker/artist.

I don’t know if Shepard Fairey intended to set landmark legal precedents in law when he started making images or when he made his now famous Obama poster, but that is what he is doing.

The reason this is so important is that the outcome of his argument with the Associated Press may in fact have a major impact on you and me as an artist. At issue is the Fair Use clause in copyright law.

I want to make it clear that I am not attempting to defend Shepard Fairey but I am attempting to defend his right; the right of Fair Use. Fairey is a convenient source because of his current case. Furthermore, I hope you will use the links I have provided to the related articles and the actual court documents to make your own argument about the issue.

That said, I have some issues I want to share with you not only about the Fair Use law but also about how the story is being presented.

First AP claims infringement of copyright over the use of the original image. What they don’t claim is that they in fact may not even own the copyright to the image. Manny Garcia the photographer may own the rights. AP never contracted with Garcia for ownership. He was a temporary hire with no contract by him or AP that would transfer ownership of the image to the Associated Press. Therefore, before AP has any claim they will have to establish ownership. And that may be another legal case in itself.

Second, is the fact that the current image in the press shown around the world is not the entire photograph that Manny Garcia took of Obama? The original image was of Obama sitting beside George Clooney. He was at a fund raising dinner for Darfur relief aid, at the National Press Club in Washington D.C in 2006. The image Shepard Fairey used and altered is a cropped version of the original.

Third is the fact that Fairey took the cropped pose and significantly altered it. He not only altered the image by transforming it into a very graphic and abstract version of the original, he altered the content or purpose. He created new work of art based on the original by adding new expression and meaning.

Why is this important, because many artists use other people’s images for inspiration and transform those images into new works of art? Any body who has clipped pictures out of a magazine to make a collage has done exactly what Shepard Fairey did. Those old wallpaper design catalogs count too.

Equally important I believe is for the press to get the story right. Why didn’t they print the original photograph that I found in a link to court records, provided by the Mercury News? It took me about 5 minutes to find a version of the image I could use, when everybody else published the cropped version.  I think the image they used unfairly slants the story and implies a different approach to the work Fairey created, inspired by the original image.

Copyright law is as complex as image making today. With new digital technology and the internet, available images have multiplied by a thousand fold and fair use is a major issue for artists everywhere.

I also want to note that Shepard Fairey has openly given Manny Garcia credit for his image and the inspiration the image had on Fairey’s work. As an artist have you ever been inspired by another artists work? Have you ever used another artist’s work as a starting point for your work?

The history of art offers many examples of fair use and transformative images, just look at an Andy Warhol image of a Campbell’s soup can. Campbell’s tried to stop him from using their trademarked image and lost. Warhol transformed the Campbell’s image into a new work of art that was inspired by the original. Warhol added new expression and meaning to the image.

I don’t think the Associated press has a case and I think Shepard Fairey is rightfully protecting all of us with his legal action against AP.

Read the actual court documents and related articles below.

Tell me what you think, add your comment, it is important.

AP wants credit for Fairey Obama Image, Boston Globe.

http://www.boston.com/ae/media/articles/2009/02/05/ap_wants_credit_for_faireys_obama_image/

Mercury News Article. Court Documents Attached PDF

http://www.mercurynews.com/newsspecialreports/ci_11666008

PDF at Doc Stoc. You can download the complete court documents PDF version with images free here. You just have to register.

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/4104616/Obama-artist-complaint-vs-the-Associated-Press

Excerpt Stanford Fair Use/Copyright Stanford University Libraries

The Transformative Factor: The Purpose and Character of Your Use

In a 1994 case, the Supreme Court emphasized this first factor as being a primary indicator of fair use. At issue is whether the material has been used to help create something new, or merely copied verbatim into another work. When taking portions of copyrighted work, ask yourself the following questions:

Has the material you have taken from the original work been transformed by adding new expression or meaning?

Was value added to the original by creating new information, new aesthetics, new insights and understandings?

In a parody, for example, the parodist transforms the original by holding it up to ridicule. Purposes such as scholarship, research or education may also qualify as transformative uses because the work is the subject of review or commentary.

EXAMPLE: Roger borrows several quotes from the speech given by the CEO of a logging company. Roger prints these quotes under photos of old-growth redwoods in his environmental newsletter. By juxtaposing the quotes with the photos of endangered trees, Roger has transformed the remarks from their original purpose and used them to create a new insight. The copying would probably be permitted as a fair use.

Stanford Website/Fair Use

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/index.html

Related Posts

The Art of Politics

http://davideubank.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/the-art-of-politics/

A very well written article on the copyright debate and Shepard Fairey

Shepard Fairey is Not a Crook: by Steven Heller

Well Shepard Fairey missed his big opening at the ICA in Boston he was arrested for graffiti.  On his way to the opening where his audience awaited the Boston Police seized their man. Seems Shepard spent the few days leading up to the show creating public art in unwanted places. The Police and as it seems the people of Boston were not too impressed with his work on private property. I found the most interesting part of the story in reader comments, in the Boston Globe article.

Many of his fellow street artists mostly because of his success have criticized Fairey. They feel he has sold out to the establishment. So is this why he was out tagging to redeem his rep? Or was this a publicity gag that worked. Maybe drafting on Obama’s fame and fortune has slowed down. Fairey got a lot of good PR out of his poster. He got into the National Portrait Gallery without a ticket and he got the Boston Show. Now we will see what he gets.

I like his work to be honest regardless of what anybody says. I like the fact the he steals from artists of the past like Rodchenko and Heartfield. I like the fact that he uses familiar images that bombard us, only he makes us pay attention to them. I like the fact that he has a social agenda, that he is a voice that has power. I like the fact is getting attention, but he may not be so happy if he lands in jail. But hey you can’t buy this kind of stuff on your resume.

When Henry David Thoreau was in jail for his civil disobedience, his friend asked him what he was doing in there. Thoreau replied, “What are you doing out there”? 

Story in the Boston Globe

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/02/08/street_artist_will_get_day_in_court_for_pasting_up_his_art/

Read the Comments, very interesting.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/02/controversial_s_1.html?p1=Well_MostPop_Emailed6

Related Posts by David Eubank

The Art of Politics

http://davideubank.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/the-art-of-politics/

The Vocabulary of Change

http://davideubank.wordpress.com/2008/11/10/rodchenko-heartfield-fairey-the-vocabulary-of-change/

The image of nicely dressed gallery technicians with white gloves caringly mounting Shepard Fairey’s “Hope” portrait of Barrack Obama is as puzzling as the art itself. Don’t get me wrong I like Shepard Fairey’s work. But the only way he could have gotten through the door of the National Portrait Gallery before Barrack Obama was to stand in line like the rest of us. So why now?

• Carolyn Carr, the Chief Curator of the National Portrait Gallery quoted in the New York Times said.

“One of the reasons the gallery acquired it is the image, as opposed to the object, is ubiquitous and it became the image of the campaign”. Carr believes that Fairey’s image of Obama has a “Lasting Resonance”.

• I think she is right; Fairey’s image of Obama is really the image of the campaign and the idea that it is time for a new direction.

Perhaps the Obama portrait is the appearance of a New Peoples Art. As the art of Alexander Rodchenko was, images that motivate the masses to action as did Shepard Fairey’s posters in the Obama campaign. Shepard Fairey’s work takes on an almost chameleon effect dotted with the influences of past great propaganda artists like Rodchenko and John Heartfield. Dare I say that this obvious characteristic, this influence would have labeled Fairey as Too Sentimental in the past by many notable critics? But times do change as do critics. Maybe the art world is in search of something new, something that breaks out from the establish norm. Or maybe they just want to ride the wave of celebrity that Obama has brought to public eye.

• Perhaps Fairey’s work will become a part of a New Orwellian movement like his takeoff of the “OBEY”, slogan series from the movie “They Live”.

Sinister as it sounds the proof is in Fairey’s work, it supports the idea that some images have sustaining and influential power over the viewer. This idea is at the heart of Propaganda and the Art of Politics. Images reinforcing the idea, what ever that idea is, not to say that the Obama idea has dark motives, but it does certainly have a memorizing power that motivates people to action. Action in this case for positive change unlike the aliens who dominated the planet with images of OBEY in “They Live”. So has Fairey arrived as the Peoples Gangster Artist? Only time will tell the whole story of a “Lasting Resonance”. Shepard Fairey himself recognizes the modern attention span of his audience, I wonder if our collective curators do too.

• Read the New York Time Article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/weekinreview/25kennedy.html?ref=us

On Tuesday, as Barack Obama was being sworn into office, his portrait by the street artist Shepard Fairey — reproduced endlessly during the campaign until it became the defining image of the future president (it towered over a stage at one of the inaugural balls) — was on view at the National Portrait Gallery. A collaged poster of it had just entered the collection along with portraits by artists like Gilbert Stuart (George Washington), Norman Rockwell (Richard Nixon) and Elaine de Kooning (John Kennedy).

N.Y.TIMES By Randy Kennedy

• Read More:

The Vocabulary of Change

http://davideubank.wordpress.com/2008/11/10/rodchenko-heartfield-fairey-the-vocabulary-of-change/

The Art of Politics

http://davideubank.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/the-art-of-politics/

The Art of Campaign Propaganda

http://davideubank.wordpress.com/the-art-of-politics/the-art-of-campaign-propaganda-obama-and-the-terrorist/

The Art of Propaganda VS DaDa

http://davideubank.wordpress.com/2008/08/24/the-art-of-propaganda-vs-dada/

Wind from the Sea

The Passing of Andrew Wyeth 1917 – 2009

The gap between Andrew Wyeth and the modern art world is perhaps the same as the disconnection between modern society and the natural environment. Andrew Wyeth painted simple pictures of a simple life in his rural New England America. His painting however reflects on the complexities of even the most basic life lived.  The established art community of Andrew Wyeth’s generation shunned his work but he followed his chosen path and ignored his critics and he painted his world as he saw it. In my opinion, this in itself makes Wyeth a great American Painter. He was a man that saw and looked for an understanding of his immediate world, the world he lived in, using his neighbors, their simple lives and the landscape where he lived to capture stories he told us about them on his canvas.

Andrew Wyeth recorded the connection of the natural world and the sustaining human connection of life dependant on the environment. People in Wyeth’s portraits of rural New England America dig in the earth; slaughter their own meat, meat that comes from animals not kept as pets but as resources. Sustainability directly connected to the natural environment.  His imagery was of fields, hillsides, wildlife, farmhands, farm tools, fixtures and furniture. He spoke of the tranquility of a simple life juxtaposed to its turbulence, its cruelty, its tenderness and compassion. He used details that connected his subjects to the functional environment, hanging animal carcasses, rifles, hunters and meat hooks. In the detail of his images exists the evidence of natural decay, violence and loss of entropy the nature of any system to run down. Fallen trees broken logs cracked ceilings and peeling paint portray the decay all things must under go.

“Compared to master draftsmen, Wyeth cannot draw,” wrote Washington Post art critic Paul Richard in a 1987 review of an exhibition of the Helga paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. New York’s Village Voice newspaper called Mr. Wyeth’s art “formulaic stuff, not very effective even as institutional realism . . .”

It is hard to imagine that his critics were so cruel so disconnected from his view of the world, from his art. Perhaps his critics suffer from the same disconnection from the natural environment, as does our modern society. We find nourishment in the freezer section of the Super Market without a connection to where our TV dinner came from. Of how the meat, the vegetables became part of the modern meal. A disconnection from the idea, that people worked with their hands in the dirt or bloodied their hands in the slaughter of the turkey that is their dinner, in the microwave.

Many of his critics suggested that Wyeth was out of touch with the artistic trends of his time. Abstraction and non-representational trends in the modern art of his time that have today become artificial, introspective and disconnected from nature, developed into a artificial nature of there own design. I would suggest that many museum directors and art critics have lost their ability to recognize any art that is not of the modern vocabulary they choose to recognize. The masters of the art world share a prejudice that has disconnected them from the natural environment and nature itself. Artists are victims of this prejudice too. Many of today’s contemporary artists are trained to make art that

simply stated, looks like what art is expected to look like. Others seek shocking and controversial imagery hoping to shock the critics into looking. This is not to say that modern art is without merit and that the many artworks are not important and valid. It is a suggestion that the critics and directors are to busy looking at what they believe is important that they ignore the artist who has a different insight a different point of view. These Masters of the Art-World have lost their objectivity their connection to nature. They have become artificial unto themselves and they have lost their vision if they ever had one to begin with. Andrew Wyeth was able to maintain his vision in spite of his critics and he was successful in following the path he chose for himself ignoring the experts. This is not to suggest that we as artists should be representational painters but that we should ask ourselves the deeper questions about our art, to explore our beliefs and intentions. To ask ourselves the hard questions that can’t be answered by the critic but only by our investigations into our own subject matter.

“In the art world today, I’m so conservative I’m radical. Most painters don’t care for me. I’m strange to them,” he said in a 1965 interview with Richard Meryman for Life magazine. “A lot of people say I’ve brought realism back. They try to tie me up with Eakins and Winslow Homer. To my mind they are mistaken. I honestly consider myself an abstractionist. Eakins’ figures actually breathe in the frame. My people, my objects breathe in a different way; there’s another core — an excitement that’s definitely abstract.” Quote Andrew Wyeth

Andrew Wyeth wasn’t an artist without personal controversy. In the 1980’s when he unveiled his more than 200 works, 45 paintings and 200 sketches, the Helga series, he shocked the world and his wife who knew nothing about the artwork or the fifteen-year relationship Wyeth had with his model. Helga Testorf was Wyeth’s Chadds Ford neighbor who modeled for him over the fifteen-year period. Many of the paintings and sketches are of Helga nude. His images of her show her beauty and perhaps his love for her. I am not sure if this was a love affair but how can an artist who works so intensely with a subject not be in love. The work received the same welcoming for the critics.  It was not of their standard. Perhaps Wyeth revealed too much of his affection for Helga in the work, perhaps his vision was obscured by his love. Still, I find the Helga series hauntingly beautiful, connected to the natural desire between a man and a woman. The work is Illicit, torrid, sinful and at the same time tender, loving and natural.

Braids

The prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York refused even to display the Helga paintings. “We had an opportunity to show the Helga series. We quite pointedly and as a conscious decision declined to do so,” said museum director Philippe de Montebello in 1987.

Andrew Wyeth is a great American Artist; his work will be the subject of debate for many years to come. If the Masters of the Art-World ever hear Andrew Wyeth’s voice then perhaps art itself has a chance to move forward. Our modern disconnection with the natural environment, the tendency to overlook the simple complexities in the relationship of ourselves with nature is at the root of why modern art has stood still and why modern

society heads toward failure. We artists need to look again at our world with fresh eyes and we can learn from the legacy Andrew Wyeth has bestowed upon us.

Read More About Andrew Wyeth

UPDATE N.Y. Times Article.  For Wyeth Both Praise and Doubt

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/17/arts/design/17deba.html

http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/16/america/wyeth.4-409557.php

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/16/AR2009011601420.html?hpid=topnews

Washington Post Photo Gallery

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2009/01/16/GA2009011602313.html

Guest Contributor

Jacob Eubank is a Photographer and Writer Living and Working in the Greater Seattle Area.

By Jacob Eubank

Gallery Photographs  http://www.jacobeubankphotography.com/ltgrant/

Swimming with Water Wings in the River Styx

On December 10, 2007, my father and I embarked on a journey that would take us across much of the Western United States. Just over a year ago, looking back provides an interesting perspective. We were certainly in different times.  Driving southward through Washington and the Oregon Coast our minds were focused on the devastation caused by tremendous rain and wind that occurred in the first weeks of the month.  Our trip was made possibly only because Interstate 5 had reopened only days before our departure. It had been closed due to flooding. Elsewhere in the country millions of people were struggling to keep their families fed in the midst of one of the worst series of ice storms that have hit the central United States in over a decade. It’s interesting to have come full circle, because as I’m writing today the waters are again receding. Now the second year in a row that I-5 has been closed due to catastrophic flooding. Nearly every river in a hundred mile radius was above its banks for three to four days. The conversations I have nearly everyday with neighbors and people who share my community are eerily similar to the conversations that transpired in the first days of our trip. Nobody can quite seem to recall the weather being this extreme in the past twenty years. It was only three weeks ago that we had over a foot of snow chocking the roadways of the greater Seattle area.  This snow stayed on the ground for over a week. It is undeniable that this is irregular. On our long drive to California, we thought much about this. Our leading scientists have concluded that even if our climate were on a normal rising cycle, humanity has still made an impact, and has accelerated this process beyond its normal pattern. Before December 2007, the Oregon Coast had never had a storm on record that had produced Category 3 Hurricane force winds. As we left Oregon and arrived in California adjusting our route to take us through Sacramento, we couldn’t help but see the extraordinary challenge that faces every one of us around every corner.

In Salem, OR I found a need for earplugs due to my fathers boisterous snoring. As I walked into the lobby of our motel I inquired with the clerk at the front desk where I might acquire such a thing. He responded kindly that I could just run over the Wal-Mart across the street. Perhaps I’m foolish and have just been too far removed from an automobile society living in the walk-able city of Seattle, for I took his words literally. As I started walking in my pajamas and flip-flops, I found out it was quite more than just across the street. In all, I ended up walking across roughly three quarters of a mile in each direction. My trek was across many vast parking lots.  As I walked I was reminded of one of the neighboring towns where I spent many days as a growing teenager. In the town of Kalispell, there used to be a thriving downtown. Many small independently owned businesses lined the streets; there was quite a lot of diversity for such a small community. Bookstores, art galleries, and many other attractions filled in around the Historic Hotel and saddle and tack store that remain relics of a time before ours. The last time I had come home had been quite the culture shock. I’d been away for almost a year, and upon arriving again it was as I had landed on Mars. In downtown Kalispell where Highway 93 shares the title of Main Street, roughly 40 percent of the business spaces were empty with signs of for lease availability in their windows. It has now been replaced with a development not unlike that of Salem. What once used to be flowing fields of wheat is now covered by asphalt. The aquifer that lies underneath it, which was once pure, untainted glacieral melt water ten thousand years in the making, is now forever linked to those parking lots. Those sewer drains that permeate the surface now carry all of the debris and carcinogens that fall from our vehicles, straight down to that very aquifer.

The next morning as we got back on the interstate with our headings towards Sacramento, the extent of how reliant we are on our automobiles for everything. The amount of cars on the road was staggering. I thought Seattle was terrible for traffic when I first moved there, and upon seeing Sacramento, I couldn’t imagine what Los Angeles is like. The connection between our reliance on the automobile, and our increasingly extreme weather patterns were becoming more unpredictable had become undeniable for me. I felt it was shameful that so few people could realize the true gravity of this situation.

California brought many other realizations as well.  As you come over the mountains in Northern California, you pass through Redwoods National Forest. This is one of our last great old growth forests in the United States. In 1991, nearly two decades ago, the National Commission on Science for Sustainable Forestry concluded that less that six percent of our forests consist of old growth. The tragedy found in the story of the American Redwoods is that there are no old growth Redwood Forests that exist any longer outside the gates of protected land. In just under a hundred and fifty years a once thriving and ancient forest was reduced to near exhaustion. A forest thousands of years in the making disappeared in just over an average persons lifetime.  This again hit home for me. Where I spent much of my youth was in the shelter of a similar forest. In the many acres that compose Glacier National Park, reside pockets of some of the oldest growth cedar that is found in Montana. In the past year, the forest that surrounds these protected lands has shared virtually the same tale. Over the last several years the community in the Flathead Valley has felt the same critical stress our forests of Northwest Montana have. As harvestable timber has become consumed faster than it can replenish itself, the radius in which retrieving that wood has expanded.  For a short time this business model was sustained by the creation of several trucking companies in the area to haul the materials the extra distance.  Slowly but surely though, those additional forested areas became thinned out, and the bubble burst. It quickly became apparent to these business owners that it was no longer cost effective to haul these immature logs as far as they were. As the logging industry began to collapse, larger corporations swallowed up the failing smaller independent sawmills, thus ensuring their business another few months at a time. Last week, Plum Creek, one of the largest timber companies in the country was for the first time forced curtailed its operations, by shutting down its MDF plant at its Northwest Regional Headquarters. This was one of the last large production lines that had remained open over the last several years. It is a huge blow to the community who had relied on Plum Creek as a reliable source of income. Now, with the environment at the edge of falling into chaos, the real costs are falling into the light. The cost of taking our forests in these ways is being set into the lap of “we the people.” It also threatens the species native to these old growth canopies. Disrupting the balance of biodiversity has wide and long-term effects. It leaves our forests prone to disaster, with nothing left standing to keep the balance. In the last decade there have been numerous naturally occurring events that have had huge consequences as there simply were and are not sufficient numbers of trees standing to survive these events. From bacterial and viral diseases such as Red Blister Rust that effects the ever becoming rare white pine trees, to invasive beetles that destroy the bark of several other species of pine to the point at which the trees atrophy and die. The point that kept resurfacing for us came again and again; what will the ultimate cost of our modern expansion be?

Within a day of leaving Sacramento, we finally arrived in Death Valley. In the middle of the night we drove into our first unobstructed view of the night sky either of us had seen for some time. As we parked the car in the middle of the highway and shut off the lights, darkness set in. I lit a cigarette and turned my eyes to the sky. Moments before, we had finished a conversation that led us to stop the car. We had been talking about the nature of the sky and the stars.  We had been focused on the central theme of how many people have never seen a night sky like we were experiencing. Many of the friends I had made since arriving in Seattle had spent their entire lives in the city. This was something I couldn’t imagine myself. So upon this realization, we stopped the car and got out.  As I inhaled my first drag and blew the smoke out through my nose, a giant green fireball tore across the sky. Death Valley really is incredible for one great reason in my mind. At night, you have an almost perfect 180-degree dome view of the sky. As this meteor rumbled over us, we were able perceive the curve of our atmosphere. The brush and dry cracked desert that it scoured were lit up with the green glow we all experience in the momentary flashes on July Fourth, except this lasted for seconds. As the light faded and we were plunged back into darkness we looked towards each other and just chuckled and simultaneously exclaimed, “Whoa…!” We finished our cigarettes and continued driving until we reached Stovepipe Wells. That night we spent many more hours under the night sky, reconnecting with the world our ancestors saw 10,000 years ago.  I went to bed that night after a few Johnny Walkers with the thought of how great it is that this truly special place has been set aside. The next day would prove to surprise me once again.

Furnace Creek is an interesting place. It is the second of only about five places in Death Valley where drinkable water has been found by drilling a very deep well. This is because the valley floor used to be an ocean, so the only water on the surface is full of salt, and therefore cannot be consumed. What we found in the late afternoon was something I never expected in a National Park. We pulled into the gas station furnace wells and as we filled up the car we surveyed our new surroundings. There is a small lodge and a few private residences fill the rest of this small settlement. In the middle of it all though, there were hundreds of Date Palms.  I’m not kidding, palm trees in the middle of a place that gets less than two inches of water a year. It was even more disheartening to discover their long established golf course. For decades now they’ve been pumping the little water in their special aquifer and using it to maintain that perfect green turf. I’m sorry, but I firmly believe Death Valley is no place for a golf course; A golf course in a desert like Death Valley offers as much purpose as making popsicles in an oven.  I was truly shocked to see that the NPS would allow non-native species to be planted within the boundaries of the park. The entire purpose of the NPS is to keep these wildernesses pristine. The golf course was just insult on top of that, a complete mockery of the design we have made for our special places that need to be preserved.

We explored the valley floor for a while longer, and had to make our way on home to Montana. The road out of Death Valley that we took led us on our way back North through Las Vegas. Our entry to the city of lights was the defining moment of our realization that has brought us to this project.  As you drive in or out of Las Vegas, on each end of the city you’re greeted by two separate power plants, one of which burns coal to generate electricity to run all of those sparkling lights that make up the Vegas Strip. We couldn’t help but think about how out of harmony we are with our planet.

Our drive continued through Utah, Idaho, and ended in Montana. Through the last leg of our trip we slugged along processing all that we had seen. Deciding we needed a rest, we took up residence in the lodge at Chico Hot Springs, MT.  It was the perfect end to our journey into the unknown.  In Chico, a few year round employees run a small lodge, the hot-spring pool, and a greenhouse and garden. During the summer months the community central to Chico grows their own food in the garden, much of it ending up used in the lodge’s restaurant. In the winter, they are able to maintain their comfort foods that normally would be out of season. They have a greenhouse that utilizes the hot mineral water to generate enough warmth in the soil for anything they want to grow.  They actually maintain an avocado tree year round, and are able to harvest that fruit in even the coldest winter months. They certainly have found a sustainable, low impact way of life in Chico. They don’t take more than is needed off their land, and because of such, will be able to benefit from the natural beauty of the hills and mountains of south-central Montana into the future. This was a glimmer of hope in the wake of such an incredibly desperate time in our history. The challenge is enormous; it is a scale of such magnitude that it will take the cooperation of people across the globe. Our trivial disputes of borders, religion, colors, and many of the things that make us different must stop. Without a decisive move on a global scale to abandon or alter our current trends and ways of life, we are all going to be recipients of the repercussions. If we continue to saw down our forests, pollute our air, destroy our clean water, and poison our land, our planet is going to become a harsh wasteland that is uninhabitable. This is the cost of our expansion. Many of these precious few resources that are still harvestable are dwindling. Much of the material is wasted in inferior quality design, the by-product of which is cities that are devastatingly impaired when it comes to surviving natural disasters.  If we keep expanding at our current rates, there will not be enough left to make it through another century before we consume everything on this planet. The degradation we see in the Western United States has only occurred in the last hundred and fifty years, and it’s speed grows exponentially every day. What is going to be the legacy we leave for the next two generations? With the changes that have occurred in the lifetimes of my father and his father, if this arrogant design that is the way we live is allowed to continue, there may not be much left in the world of my future grandson.

 

• It seems like it was so long ago now that my son and I took a road trip to Death Valley.

It was only a little over a year ago now. Our purpose was to take photographs to document our trip. It was a photographers outing. We both just wanted to get away from the must do’s of work and life itself. But that trip turned into something far beyond what I expected as did the coming year 2008. We had two weeks to ourselves, no obligations. The impending changes of 2008 that December before were just talk. Talk about how improbable it was that Barrack Obama would even make it through the primary elections let alone become President. The economy was not really on the radar as much as climate changes. We drove south from Seattle down the coast where a category 3 hurricane type storm battered the northern west coast like never before. The road lined with trees torn out of the ground and snapped off as if twigs were a testament of the power of that storm. Seawalls breeched by record tides had devastated the small towns along the coast that were now in a state of organized recovery. No national press about this storm like Katrina was in the headlines but the damage was impressive. As we journeyed on toward our destination, we talked a lot about changes that were occurring right now. Maybe it was just random events as weather is, or maybe not.

• After a long day of driving, we approached Death Valley it was dark.

Night comes early in December. Stop here I have to take a leak. Here was nowhere in the middle of nothing, just a dark road that connected Death Valley with the rest of the world. We got out of the car, lit a smoke, and proceeded to relieve ourselves when the sky lit up like a roman candle.  As monstrous greenish blue fire ball with a tail that stretched across the horizon burned right over our heads. Did you see that? What the F_ _ _ was that Jake said. A meteor I think I answered. Let’s go! So we jumped into the car and headed down a steep grade that seemed to go on forever to the valley floor. As we arrived at Stovepipe Wells, we were still taking about that Meteor. That Meteor and the hundreds we saw over the next couple of days really change me, as did this scorched wasteland that is Death Valley. But that was in 2007 and I really didn’t know then what I know now because now was the future then.

•  As I watched my son work, I realized how much he had learned in school, studying his craft as a Photographer.

He was perfectly at home with a camera in his hands; the camera was an extension of him now. He had encouraged me to bring his old digital camera with me; I wasn’t really a digital guy then, so struggled with this new gadget. While for him, the digital technology was just part of him. Jake I thought has always had a good eye a Photographers eye an Artists eye. Even back when he was a kid and I taught him how to develop film in the laundry room. He always made interesting and stunning images. Now I got to see him working at a professional level with confidence and excitement.

We spent the next couple of days running around Death Valley taking pictures by day and talking about what we had done around a campfire at night while watching an amazing meteor shower drinking Johnny Walker. Too soon, we headed home to Montana, it was the holidays and we promised to come home. Jake finished school and graduated in June. I went back to work life was good. Then came the bust, chaos, fear, and well you all know the story so it needs no repeating. Jake is still taking pictures, but jobs are lean. Me I am laid off for the winter and hope that spring will bring more work; there is nothing here in Montana now. That seems to be the story across the country, bad news and more bad news. Its damm, depressing.

Jake and I are beginning to work on a new project and have been talking on the phone and planning. Death Valley and our experience there is a starting point for what I, we hope will be an exciting Photo Documentary project, a future project. You see we have to keep going, we have to keep keeping on. So this is where I leave you with a poem I wrote about our trip last year.

 

You can’t see the meteors for all of the shooting stars

 Meteors hidden by the tales of shooting stars

Foreign palm trees thirst in the sands at the bottom of the world

The desert broom blossoms with scant drops of morning dew

Butterflies nap in shady crevasses of wash cut walls waiting for the night

Ravens fly to and fro calling to those who wait for their voices ready to hear

Land void, punctuated by the transgressions of fickle men

Abundant rainbows of solitude waiting to fill the dry breath of eyes looking

Spring weeps courageous over the land parched after seasons of scorched thirst and death, full of breath and spirit and life

Do not grieve that; that is to pass and passing, continuance replenishes the void

Hope rises with every new sun; rest comes when coolness covers the world with a moon dark

Shooting stars hide meteors with fireworks in the moonless sky

Glass bottles melt in the fire so hot, cracking in the cool desert air into mirrors reflecting the end of all things that must come

Morning brings the grey dove of this desert that feasts on the ashes of the night lost

Follow the raven that sees over the horizon, flying without fear he enjoys today, his kind knows tomorrow having survived countless yesterdays in the barren landscape many forsake, hope is found by those who look, who see

Tomorrow will come as stars fall from a blue sky, be not like the coyote who waits at the crossroads for his dinner, fly with the raven who is master in this land

Wear hope like the meteor whose copper green beacon fills the sky

Falling stars have marked time since the beginning of everything

 The Raven sees meteors when no one else is looking

See more of Jakes work at Jacob Eubank Photography Seattle Washington.

Jacob Eubank and the Raven

http://jacobeubankphotography.com/

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Today’s headlines detail the failure of our way of life, a human system on the brink of Collapse.

This is not a new story in the history of civilization. It is a story of transition from the past to the present and an uncertain future. Several years ago, I read Jarred Diamond’s book Collapse. He writes about the people of Chaco Canyon and the failure of their system, their way of life. They exhausted the natural resources that had been the source of their success as a culture. In the end the climate, the environment changed and civilization failed. Throughout the Western United States lay the ruins of the past.

• The people vanished

as their environment no longer sustained them, from the Wupatki culture http://www.nps.gov/wupa to the Chaco Culture http://www.nps.gov/chcu they were gone.

• Today the reasons why these civilizations failed is part speculation and part science, the mystery of what, when and where they went remains un-spoken in stories of a vanished civilization.

After reading Diamond’s account of the failure of the Chaco Culture, I wanted to go to New Mexico and see for myself this place of mystery of un-spoken stories. I embarked on my expedition of discovery, I went as an Artist not as a Scientist. My discoveries are intuitive, based on my feeling about this place.  My intuition, my gut feeling about what happened and what remains were my source, my sense of this place.

• Diamond writes about an enterprising culture that had a purpose to develop beyond their limits and technology to sustain them.

They were a culture that destroyed their sustainable environment for the sake of development of expansion. It is un-clear in the forgotten stories why this development was so important to the Chacoan’s.  Some archeologists believe the pueblos were only used during ceremonial seasons and that only a small population of people inhabited the area year round. As the story goes, thousands of visitors would come to Chaco during the ceremonial seasons to celebrate their stories, their beliefs. Perhaps this account is true or maybe there is a story untold.

• Diamond writes about how the people deforested the landscape.

They cut down all of the trees of what once was a forest far beyond what the eye can see into the distance from the canyon so they could build their city. What remains is a desolate landscape void of any large trees. Ponderosa Pine covered the landscape before. Diamond estimates that the Chaco people cut down tens of thousands of trees as far away as a sixty-mile radius from the Chaco site. This was a time when horses did not roam the landscape and all of the timber moved was by the manual labor of the people. They carried or pulled the fallen trees to the city and they built great structures. In the process, they changed the flow of water of their life substance and slowly the environment turned against them. Corn, which was the food of the gods no longer, grew in this place. Slowly they vanished as a culture. There is evidence that the last Chacoan’s began recycling. They salvaged material from older buildings and reused them to continue building new ones. But this was an effort too late because the environment became the master of this land– a land unable to sustain a human presence. To be sure, descendants of the Chaco Culture still exist throughout the region. Fragmented disenfranchised from one another they either sought survival on their own or assimilated into other groups. They became us a thousand years into the future beyond Chaco.

• As I drove toward Chaco Canyon in December 2006 Diamond’s description of the landscape became un-mistakable, a desolate place, a vast void in the forest.

Traveling many miles from anywhere, you come to the canyon. At first, you look hard to see any remains, any ruins, as they appear camouflaged, assimilated into the cliffs of the canyon walls. Then the ruins rise up out of the ground and the land takes on a new presence, a human presence.

As I walked through the ruins, I imagined the stories told and the laughter in the Kivas, circular rooms where people gathered to enjoy the company of others. Room after room the presence of the people remains. The great canyon wall that shelters the city is a place for stories bearing evidence of art and culture. Rock Art, perhaps the billboards or the signs of the culture tell the story– water, rain, of corn, and of new comers. I think many of these drawings are maps, signs for the next generation that tells where the water flowed and where you plant corn. Stains in the rock face of the canyon show the eons of sediment from the flow of water now gone.

• Images of plenty, of corn and raindrops on water and an awareness of time speak to me from the images of ancient artists.

Artists who were aware that they had the ability to speak beyond their own time, to communicate into a future they would not know themselves. 

• The question I asked myself was, “Did their simple depictions of life in Chaco etched into the rock hold the key to the complexity of their culture?” Like images in a child’s picture book absent of sophisticated language, the artists tell their stories.

Stories told with the awareness of time for us.  Stories told with the intention to teach generation after generation. As time flowed where water stopped, the lessons have changed. Are we now today looking at our future through the eyes of the artists and builders of Chaco Canyon?

This is the very premise that Jarred Diamond writes about in his book. It is the awareness that systems fail, that things fall apart. It is the idea that if a culture can recognize these changes– the limits of their environment soon enough, that they can change their behavior to ensure their sustainability.

• It was not war here in the Americas or some far-reaching natural disaster like an asteroid impact that brought failure to the Chacoan’s.

It was a system design of their own making that brought upon them the end of their culture. A failure just as we are surely bringing upon ourselves.

• This series of Photographs will perhaps tell the story of my intuitive feeling about the stories and names we can speak No More.

Visit The Gallery and see the Exhibit

http://eubank.home.bresnan.net/We%20Can%20Speak%20Their%20Names%20No%20More/index.html

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