Life Too Much Information
posted by March 8 at 21:46 PM
onOne thing that always throws me off about the Fiction piece in The New Yorker is that it often comes with a photo.
It’s fiction. How is there a photograph? These houses and this street are real; vividly and mysteriously so. They have a history of their own. And so, I want to know about that history. Really.
Richard Ford’s story ends up competing with that.
I guess the real reason it’s jarring to run pictures with the fiction is because the rest of the magazine is loaded up with non-fiction. This week, for example, there’s a story on Michelle Obama with her picture. Makes sense.
But then you turn the page to the short story and there’s this:
It creates an inconsistency in the magazine. There’s a picture of a real person with a story about real people, and there’s a picture of a real person with a story about imaginary people. Mixed messaging.
It’d be like if you were at a restaurant, and with each course they brought out silverware, and then when they brought out the bill, they handed you a fork to sign with.
Who is that woman? Really.
Comments
"It creates an inconsistency in the magazine."
Oh tough up, guppie! You can dig it if you try.
photographs run the gamut from non-fiction to fiction just as writing does. though a camera takes real world inputs to create a photograph, (in the same way that a writer does real world research, even for a fictional piece) its output is no more 'real' by necessity than the story it is attached to.
But maybe I'm thinking too hard about it.
Josh, that's such a First World White Male problem.
Yeah the consistency in the Stranger is respectable and not the least bit busy.
you mean actors arent the real people in movies?
please josh, let charles tackle these non issues.
I know! Totally annoying! And just the other day my biscotti was stale -- life so SO HARD.
Josh, the picture is identified in the sideways photocredit caption as 'New Orleans, 2007.' If you look closely at the picture, you can see the flood line on the house - it's the lower half of the house, where it's a darker blue.
The story is set in New Orleans, oh, now-ish, and is about two homes and families and how the flood has changed their circumstances, literally wrecked the homes. The pic is the mind-setting for the story, a backdrop or something. I've noticed that this is often the case for the graphics they lead with.
I haven't gotten to the Kunzru thing yet. If I get a read on the pic I'll try to check in.
One other thing - in 'Down By Law' Jarmusch uses real New Orleans settings in-camera to tell his small-scale slacker story. In 'King Creole' we see a made-up version of Elvis played by Elvis in actual New Orleans locales. Does the use of location shots affect your consumption of the fictions in these cases?
I agee, Josh, but that's the least of the New Yorker's problems. More annoying elements of its fall from grace include much less depth in its non-fiction, exchanging quality for "diversity" in its fiction, and a much more partisan editoral voice. But it is, alas, much more profitable than it was 15 years ago.
Not sure If I concur on 'diversity' David, since there seems to be a predictable stable of fiction contributors, including Kunzru.
Anyway, I think I have the key to the pic:
Halfway into the first complete paragraph on p 110:
"I was seated next to Thanh, who'd cut her hair into a fringe. She looked like a Vietnamese Nico."
Also, the pic is by longtime rock video director and photographer Stephane Sednaoui. I think it's, again, a photo illustration - mmmmaybbe the model is REALLY a loft-dwelling Manhattan scenester, but I don't care. She provides the mask that Thanh will wear while I skip over the parts of the story I find boring, as I will.
I have always had this same problem with their fiction, and I'm not a white guy! The accompanying photo (not related to the story) has *always* thrown me. I think this is one reason why I read the fiction last, if I do at all.
And I have to say that I really like the writing of the New Yorker when Tina Brown was editor. Now, not so much.
Thankfully, The New Yorker (voice of so many of the worst tendencies of post-war American fiction and "journalism") will be with us only a few more years until it is completely eviscerated by the blogosphere.
For a site/news-source that likes to tell us, endlessly, about what new art is hanging around Seattle it seems some of the staff are clueless concerning the use of visual images to enhance the written word.
Or you're just really, really high and had what you THOUGHT was an epiphany.
As to TGR @12 - I hope not, I enjoy The New Yorker, its the only magazine I subscribe to.
There is about 85 years of photography theory on this... To which dbell alludes.
I love it when you're drunk.
I miss illustrations. Magazines used to do neat illustrations on fiction stories. Doesn't anybody know how to draw anymore?
You type too much like C.Mudede now.
How do you know that picture isn't fictionn as well? Perhaps it's a Photoshopped composite of several different people?
Oh, that reminds me, Josh is an idiot.
I totally get what you are saying Josh!
Josh is onto something.
Who is this woman? Who cares! She's just a prop to look at, not a real person. Minorities and women are often used in 'arty' photos. Imagine if it was a white guy instead of an Asian woman. Everyone would wonder who the guy is. Is he an artist? A new billionaire? Does he work for Google? Did he design a building? Or does he make important chairs? So may questions.
But I bet you are the first person to wonder, who the hell is this woman? There should be an answer by the New Yorker to this question, but there's not. It's just an object, this woman. Pretty! Carry on...
I agree, photography is inappropriate. Fiction should only be accompanied by illustration.
Photography IS illustration, btw.
It's a picture that suggests, refers to and/or alludes to something else. Kinda like words do.
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