A Photo Student logo (old)
A brief follow-up to my account of the theft of my copyrighted essay, a 1971 Diane Arbus obituary, recently published illegally by James Pomerantz at his blog, A Photo Student. As I noted in my report, I not only demanded its immediate removal from that site but posted a comment at his blog refuting the ridiculous notion that Pomerantz somehow deserved the thanks he’d received from his visitors for oh so generously “sharing” something he’d “found.” Pomerantz quickly removed that comment of mine (as well as the article he’d pirated), clearly not wanting any trace of his misbehavior at his site.
A regular reader of Photocritic International subsequently followed a link from my blog to that Comments page at A Photo Student, finding there, a few days ago, the following comment left by one Gladness Hilton (not me, I assure you), of which I was unaware:
“Your byline suggests that you like to learn and educate. Why then did you remove the author’s comments pertaining to your breach of copyright after you posted the Diane Arbus obituary from Village Voice? If you yourself are confused about IP issues, you must have learned from that legal slip up, so why not share it with us, rather than sweep it under the table as though it never happened?” (Click here to see this comment as it originally appeared. Scroll down to the last comment.)
A Photo Student logo (new)
Sometime between its posting on the morning of August 1 and noon on August 5, Pomerantz deleted that comment as well. He also deleted his blog’s previous subtitle/motto: “Because we all have a thing or two to learn . . .” Can’t blame him for that. A dicey slogan, upon reflection, for someone who plays fast and loose with the intellectual property of others, feigns ignorance of the copyright law, then hides the fact that he got caught red-handed. And permitting, even encouraging free and open pro and con discussion of your own words and actions in the Comments feature of your blog — that’s just asking for trouble. I speak from experience here (but then, as my readers know, I have a sweet tooth for trouble).
•
Katyn Massacre memorial, Mednoye. Courtesy Creatve Commons.
“Moscow art dealer opens contemporary art centre in Tver,” a story in The Art Newspaper by Sophia Kishkovsky datelined July 13, 2011, explains that “Marat Guelman, the Moscow gallery pioneer who transformed Perm, a rough industrial centre in the Ural mountains region of Russia, into a contemporary art destination, has opened TverCA, a new contemporary art centre in a Stalin-era river terminal in Tver, a historic city on the Volga river near Moscow.” This prompted me to leave a comment at The Art Newspaper‘s website, to wit:
You state that “Some cultural critics . . . say that the show foments nationalism by highlighting ethnic origin, for example, ‘Kazimir Malevich—Pole’, and ‘Maya Plisetskaya—Jewess’.” Since, as you must know, there are Polish Jews and Ukrainian Catholics, both you and this show’s curators have conflated ethnicity, religion, and nationality. Not a promising situation.
Does the planned rehabilitation of Tver as a cultural-tourism destination involve any acknowledgment of the historical fact that, at the outset of WWII, under its Stalin-era name of Kalinin, Tver served Uncle Joe and his henchmen as a killing ground for thousands of Poles of all religious persuasions?
Vasili Mikhailovich Blokhin, chief executioner for the NKVD, is reported to have personally shot and killed 7,000 of the condemned, some as young as 18, from the Ostashkov camp at Kalinin prison over a period of 28 days in April 1940. Could be material for an art piece or two in there somewhere — maybe enough for a show.
Vasili Mikhailovich Blokhin’s official portrait.
Tver, in short, certainly earned the adjective “historic,” having functioned as one of several locales in which what’s known as the Katyn Massacre took place. Wikipedia sources the tally given for Blokhin to Simon Sebag Montefiore‘s book Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, which won History Book of the Year at the 2004 British Book Awards — presumably a credible reference. In his account, Montefiore elaborates on Blokhin’s approach to the task: “He brought a butcher’s leather apron and cap which he put on when he began one of the most prolific acts of mass murder by one individual, killing 7,000 in precisely twenty-eight nights, using a German Walther pistol to prevent future exposure.” [The Soviets blamed the Katyn Massacre on the Nazis until 1990. Walther pistols were sent by Moscow to the executioners specifically to further that deception.]
6000-plus is the conservative approximation I’ve seen elsewhere for the Tver murders, accomplished by single gunshots to the back of the head. And the nights may not have been consecutive; I’ve seen April 4 given as the starting date and May 19 as the concluding session, suggesting that the perpetrators may have taken weekends, May 1 — a Wednesday that year — and other days off. In the event, Blokhin (with the assistance of his co-workers, who brought the victims in, dragged their bodies out, and handled the clean-up chores) averaged 250 per night; according to one source, “the shooting started in the evening and ended at dawn.”
The killings were done in the cellar of the NKVD regional headquarters on Sovietskaya Street in Kalinin; the bodies were taken from that abbatoir for burial in a mass grave in a field in nearby Mednoye, planted over with pine trees and seeded with land mines to keep away the curious. This feat earned Blokhin the Guinness World Record for “Most Prolific Executioner” in 2010. (For a brilliant revisiting of this slaughter, see Martin Cruz Smith‘s 2007 novel, Stalin’s Ghost.)
I’m envisioning a performance piece for TverCA, this “new contemporary art centre.” Every weekday starting in early April, for 28 days (with breaks), from dusk till dawn, a man carrying a Walther PPK and wearing a Soviet Major-General’s uniform under a butcher’s leather apron and cap — as well the same type of shoulder-length gloves Blokhin used to further protect his uniform — stands in an installation within TverCA. It replicates, as exactly as possible based on historical records, Blokhin’s basement workplace, a specially designed room with padded walls for soundproofing, a sloping concrete floor with a drain and hose, and a log wall for the prisoners to stand against. The only difference is that the three walls that are not log-covered have small observation windows placed at regular intervals.
For ten hours at a stretch, with the occasional break, the performer places a cantaloupe on a shelf attached to the log wall, puts the barrel of the pistol against it, and fires a single shot — maintaining Blokhin’s implacable pace of one every 3 minutes. Each mock-execution gets documented with stop-action strobe cameras, Harold Edgerton-style, toward an eventual permanent installation and a traveling show. A videocam records each 10-hour stint, streaming it live to a website dedicated to the project. Bottles of vodka are passed around at the end of each session, as was Blokhin’s custom, along with bottles of Midori Melon Liqueur.
Cantaloupes. USDA photo by Scott Bauer.
The remains are removed and hosed away by others in the performance team, and buried before dawn in pre-dug trenches on the nearby riverbank, a section dedicated to commemorating the Katyn Massacre thenceforth. (Notably, there is no such memorial in Tver itself.) This melon garden will be tended in perpetuity by the staff of TverCA; the fruits that spring from the seeds thus planted will be served, free of charge, to TverCA visitors in the centre’s cafeteria; any excess will get distributed to the citizens of this fine city — first come, first served — during each growing season. All in the interests of bringing history alive for the cultural tourists TverCA hopes to attract, and reminding Tver’s residents of their city’s memorable past.
How say you? Should I make the proposal to Mr. Guelman and his colleagues?
SPJ Research Award 2014
Dog Days (1): News & Notes
A Photo Student logo (old)
A brief follow-up to my account of the theft of my copyrighted essay, a 1971 Diane Arbus obituary, recently published illegally by James Pomerantz at his blog, A Photo Student. As I noted in my report, I not only demanded its immediate removal from that site but posted a comment at his blog refuting the ridiculous notion that Pomerantz somehow deserved the thanks he’d received from his visitors for oh so generously “sharing” something he’d “found.” Pomerantz quickly removed that comment of mine (as well as the article he’d pirated), clearly not wanting any trace of his misbehavior at his site.
A regular reader of Photocritic International subsequently followed a link from my blog to that Comments page at A Photo Student, finding there, a few days ago, the following comment left by one Gladness Hilton (not me, I assure you), of which I was unaware:
“Your byline suggests that you like to learn and educate. Why then did you remove the author’s comments pertaining to your breach of copyright after you posted the Diane Arbus obituary from Village Voice? If you yourself are confused about IP issues, you must have learned from that legal slip up, so why not share it with us, rather than sweep it under the table as though it never happened?” (Click here to see this comment as it originally appeared. Scroll down to the last comment.)
A Photo Student logo (new)
Sometime between its posting on the morning of August 1 and noon on August 5, Pomerantz deleted that comment as well. He also deleted his blog’s previous subtitle/motto: “Because we all have a thing or two to learn . . .” Can’t blame him for that. A dicey slogan, upon reflection, for someone who plays fast and loose with the intellectual property of others, feigns ignorance of the copyright law, then hides the fact that he got caught red-handed. And permitting, even encouraging free and open pro and con discussion of your own words and actions in the Comments feature of your blog — that’s just asking for trouble. I speak from experience here (but then, as my readers know, I have a sweet tooth for trouble).
•
Katyn Massacre memorial, Mednoye. Courtesy Creatve Commons.
“Moscow art dealer opens contemporary art centre in Tver,” a story in The Art Newspaper by Sophia Kishkovsky datelined July 13, 2011, explains that “Marat Guelman, the Moscow gallery pioneer who transformed Perm, a rough industrial centre in the Ural mountains region of Russia, into a contemporary art destination, has opened TverCA, a new contemporary art centre in a Stalin-era river terminal in Tver, a historic city on the Volga river near Moscow.” This prompted me to leave a comment at The Art Newspaper‘s website, to wit:
You state that “Some cultural critics . . . say that the show foments nationalism by highlighting ethnic origin, for example, ‘Kazimir Malevich—Pole’, and ‘Maya Plisetskaya—Jewess’.” Since, as you must know, there are Polish Jews and Ukrainian Catholics, both you and this show’s curators have conflated ethnicity, religion, and nationality. Not a promising situation.
Does the planned rehabilitation of Tver as a cultural-tourism destination involve any acknowledgment of the historical fact that, at the outset of WWII, under its Stalin-era name of Kalinin, Tver served Uncle Joe and his henchmen as a killing ground for thousands of Poles of all religious persuasions?
Vasili Mikhailovich Blokhin, chief executioner for the NKVD, is reported to have personally shot and killed 7,000 of the condemned, some as young as 18, from the Ostashkov camp at Kalinin prison over a period of 28 days in April 1940. Could be material for an art piece or two in there somewhere — maybe enough for a show.
Vasili Mikhailovich Blokhin’s official portrait.
Tver, in short, certainly earned the adjective “historic,” having functioned as one of several locales in which what’s known as the Katyn Massacre took place. Wikipedia sources the tally given for Blokhin to Simon Sebag Montefiore‘s book Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, which won History Book of the Year at the 2004 British Book Awards — presumably a credible reference. In his account, Montefiore elaborates on Blokhin’s approach to the task: “He brought a butcher’s leather apron and cap which he put on when he began one of the most prolific acts of mass murder by one individual, killing 7,000 in precisely twenty-eight nights, using a German Walther pistol to prevent future exposure.” [The Soviets blamed the Katyn Massacre on the Nazis until 1990. Walther pistols were sent by Moscow to the executioners specifically to further that deception.]
6000-plus is the conservative approximation I’ve seen elsewhere for the Tver murders, accomplished by single gunshots to the back of the head. And the nights may not have been consecutive; I’ve seen April 4 given as the starting date and May 19 as the concluding session, suggesting that the perpetrators may have taken weekends, May 1 — a Wednesday that year — and other days off. In the event, Blokhin (with the assistance of his co-workers, who brought the victims in, dragged their bodies out, and handled the clean-up chores) averaged 250 per night; according to one source, “the shooting started in the evening and ended at dawn.”
The killings were done in the cellar of the NKVD regional headquarters on Sovietskaya Street in Kalinin; the bodies were taken from that abbatoir for burial in a mass grave in a field in nearby Mednoye, planted over with pine trees and seeded with land mines to keep away the curious. This feat earned Blokhin the Guinness World Record for “Most Prolific Executioner” in 2010. (For a brilliant revisiting of this slaughter, see Martin Cruz Smith‘s 2007 novel, Stalin’s Ghost.)
I’m envisioning a performance piece for TverCA, this “new contemporary art centre.” Every weekday starting in early April, for 28 days (with breaks), from dusk till dawn, a man carrying a Walther PPK and wearing a Soviet Major-General’s uniform under a butcher’s leather apron and cap — as well the same type of shoulder-length gloves Blokhin used to further protect his uniform — stands in an installation within TverCA. It replicates, as exactly as possible based on historical records, Blokhin’s basement workplace, a specially designed room with padded walls for soundproofing, a sloping concrete floor with a drain and hose, and a log wall for the prisoners to stand against. The only difference is that the three walls that are not log-covered have small observation windows placed at regular intervals.
For ten hours at a stretch, with the occasional break, the performer places a cantaloupe on a shelf attached to the log wall, puts the barrel of the pistol against it, and fires a single shot — maintaining Blokhin’s implacable pace of one every 3 minutes. Each mock-execution gets documented with stop-action strobe cameras, Harold Edgerton-style, toward an eventual permanent installation and a traveling show. A videocam records each 10-hour stint, streaming it live to a website dedicated to the project. Bottles of vodka are passed around at the end of each session, as was Blokhin’s custom, along with bottles of Midori Melon Liqueur.
Cantaloupes. USDA photo by Scott Bauer.
The remains are removed and hosed away by others in the performance team, and buried before dawn in pre-dug trenches on the nearby riverbank, a section dedicated to commemorating the Katyn Massacre thenceforth. (Notably, there is no such memorial in Tver itself.) This melon garden will be tended in perpetuity by the staff of TverCA; the fruits that spring from the seeds thus planted will be served, free of charge, to TverCA visitors in the centre’s cafeteria; any excess will get distributed to the citizens of this fine city — first come, first served — during each growing season. All in the interests of bringing history alive for the cultural tourists TverCA hopes to attract, and reminding Tver’s residents of their city’s memorable past.
How say you? Should I make the proposal to Mr. Guelman and his colleagues?