(No. 18, a ±06 minute read)
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Sorry I missed last week. I was still sick with the flu, recovering from an overnight assignment—as in I was awake all through the night—and trying to be well enough to function early Monday morning in the studio for my final pick-up recording session.
You read that right. Recording where Beyonce and John Legend, among many other luminaries, had made pop music magic I did anything but that. I did, however, finish recording for the PRX ‘Monumental’ episode available “wherever you get your podcasts” as is said today; just search “monumental” and look for the episode from Hawai‘i. In the photo above I offer proof, of a sort, of Alison and my being a part of one another’s childhoods as the episode asserts. Her dad was very kind to take us kids fishing in the way he fished as a kid here in the 1940s—bamboo pole, no reel, catching shrimp for bait. So far as I recall anyway.
And we caught stuff! Photo by Alison’s mom, it was long ago.
The story I help tell for PRX is a story of racism, wrongful imprisonment, and echoes through time. It’s the story of the detention of ethnic Japanese in Hawai‘i after the attack at Pearl Harbor and under the authority of martial law imposed in the Hawaiian colony—a hot front line in the Pacific war. And of course this story can’t be told without addressing Executive Order 9066 and the wartime incarceration of ethnic Japanese in the continental U.S., including Alaska.
It’s a tough tale, Alison helps me tell it—really does the heavy lifting as she and her family are a part of it—and my dear pal Caroline Losneck makes it all possible with her remarkable audio storytelling skills and her extensive fancy microphone collection. And there were legions at PRX also who were a part of it, and of course in the studio—where Viki Merrick whipped me into shape and both made an utter neophyte sound like someone on NPR and became my professional crush of the year. Good god did we swear at each other and have a great time doing hard work on this unformed lump of radio clay, me, so that an incredibly tough story could be honored. Turns out long-form audio storytelling is an insane amount of work.
More to come about this story for sure, give it a listen. The people who populate it are some of my most incredible interviews, all strong and smart beyond belief, and it’s worth hanging on their every word. I am lucky to have been able to participate in ‘Monumental,’ listen to all ten episodes!
Also a lot of work, as it turns out, is teaching. And later this week I won’t exactly be teaching, but I will be speaking to first year journalism students in L.A. about language as it relates to our society’s discourse about global warming, and journalistic ethics as they relate to covering a crisis we are all a part of—yeah, global warming. Me, ethics! Turns out I may actually have them. This all got me thinking about the way I’ve started off each year in the visual storytelling class I have been given a second teaching fellowship to tackle. (I guess I didn’t too badly mess up the first group of students!)
I begin each year with a Jerome Liebling quote:
These days it seems that physical "truth" can easily be rearranged, rethought, or re-created outright. Any image can be made pristine, all the warts can be removed.
But returning to the source of a thing—the real source— means
the photographer has to watch, dig, listen for voices, sniff the smells, and have many doubts.
My life in photography has been lived as a skeptic.
Liebling maybe isn’t the best-known photographer but look at the gallery in that linked obit, you likely know some of his pictures even as you might not recognize his name. Liebling’s quote above dates to the first half of the 1990s and is from his book, The People, Yes published by Aperture. His idea of living as a skeptic is one that is critically important to photographers and journalists; as it should also be to an engaged, active citizenry.
I tell my students, working to complete a year-long documentary project, to look past the recieved wisdom about their subject and have many doubts. With a camera, open eyes, and their doubts, I tell them, they can expose a truth by the academic year’s end. And they do, so far in every case—even as they doubt me and my crazy Liebling quote in that first meeting.
We, at large today, I believe, are not skeptics in the way Liebling demonstrates by the example of his life and work, but instead have come to embrace disbelief in the way of a cynic. That should concern us all.
We no longer go to the “source of a thing” to investigate and question the world around us, but fall into slipstreams of tailored media that reinforce preconceived individual beliefs we appear unwilling to interrogate. The complexity and anxiety of our times, and our situation on an ecologically struggling planet, don’t help any. Cynicism is an easy path in the face of upheaval, and a cheap way to masquerade as knowledgeable.
But if the experience of ethnic Japanese in the U.S. during World War II tells us anything, it teaches a valuable lesson of the dangers of cynical, uninterrogated action. From the decisions of those with the power to commit racist ideas to policy (for those who were the architects of Executive Order 9066 were that, embracers of the racist ideologies of the day who saw ethnically Japanese in this country as irredeemable, less than human; their communications survive them and are damning), to those who saw the more-productive-than-average Japanese farmland in the West and wanted it for themselves, cynically using the war as an opportunity to take it, American cynicism profoundly reshaped Japanese-American trajectories. (Incredibly, the first years of WWII saw the largest transfer of land in California since the Spanish land grants as Japanese-American farmland was appropriated by competing white farmers eager to own the productive fields of Japanese farmers throughout the state.)
As we watch Israel begin to attack Rafah, essentially today one of the largest refugee camps in the world; Donald Trump say publicly that if elected he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies he perceives to not be paying the U.S. adequately in the protection racket he understands NATO to be (no NATO allies pay the U.S. for membership or military protection, payments go to a commonly managed NATO fund); and global average temperature continue to accelerate, cynicism is an easy path of least resistance. Skepticism is the antidote we need to productively examine the systems that have gotten us to this place in time.
And if that means trying to instill it in students studying photography or journalism at every opportunity I have so be it. These young folks are the ones who will be left to unwind the revanchism, exploitations of natural ecologies, and failed political systems bequeathed to them. I sure don’t have any fixes for them, I wish I did.
Lacking ready fixes we can all work to be skeptics in the Liebling way, today. Maybe by doing so we’ll find the answers we need, maybe.
Thanks for reading, as always.