On Adam Johnson's "The Orphan Master's Son"

For someone who usually turns a blind eye and a deaf ear over the varying degrees of violence that's happening all over the world, it is most unlikely that I am suddenly possessed with the temptation to pick up Adam Johnson's "The Orphan Master's Son" which is basically about the atrocious life inside DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or North Korea). There were no shilly-shallies involved and to save me the possibility of going skint the next few days, I goaded a friend to pay half its price with a deal that I lend him the book after reading it. 

I have read (in the news by accident) that once again, North Korea has been beating the Philippines with headline-worthy news on their nuclear attacks over the brewing dispute between the Sultanate of Sulu and Sabah, Malaysia. I can just imagine the toll it took on it's counterpart, the utopiac South Korea and it's personal bugbear, the U.S. If I read even further, the U.S. is ready for it's ballistic attacks. It's always news like these that gives me the funk and keeps me in bed, reading (instead) fiction for a more bearable version of these harsh realities, a diversion. 

But lo! Adam Johnson's work of fiction read like a firsthand experience in the terror torn North. The book circles around three people, with stories veering on the tragic, you'd want to go and save them yourself. Pak Jun Do, is an orphan and a trained assassin and kidnapper. He fell in love with actress Sun Moon, who is the wife of Commander Ga, the sworn enemy of the (then) Supreme Leader Kim Jong Il. There were chapters told in a first person POV and there were those told in a third person POV that sometimes you can't tell which side of reality is being narrated by who. After series of weird turns, Pak Jun Do finds himself in one of the prison camps under the identity of Commander Ga. He assumes marriage to Sun Moon who despite knowing this man who arrived in her house one night is not the Commander Ga who won her as a prized wife for bringing pride in the country. But she falls in love with him, nonetheless (but rather reluctantly). Despite coercion tactics on the autopilot ( whew! for lobotomy) Pak Jun Do still admits to the identity of Commander Ga. There is not a page that doesn't talk about the various oppressions of the people inside this hellish camp. It is a gritty and compelling work that uncovers the various horrors of this isolated half of the Korean peninsula under its supreme leader Kim Jong Il, from the various brutalities inside the camps, its coercion tactics, the massacres, of how people were starved to death, how they are duped under a perverse ideology of “propaganda” and much about cult of personality. This is a tale of aggression, fear, love and political control in one of the most self-ruling, controlled and restricted places in the world. If you've got the heart and the time to read this, it bears a promise of a brilliant story, I swear. 

On Susan Sontag's "On Photography"

Susan Sontag turns a critical eye on photography in her book “On Photography”. A collection of essays/critiques on the craft written for the “New York Review of Books” between 1973 and 1977, this book is a sheer burst of intelligent insights by one of the greatest thinkers of our time. Astute observations on photographs by photographic evangels of the past, this book can be regarded as an instant study of history; of a society of varying cultures in line with the practice and purpose of the taking pictures. While one may find her views enlightening, thought provoking even and always leaning towards the radical, unpopular; characteristic of a Sontag punch of confidence, conviction and wit, one may not always find ones self agreeing to everything. The fact that this is the very first reference on criticisms on the craft, its value cannot be easily undermined especially in the aspect of thorough education on “what” to observe and “how” to observe a photograph. Those who share the passion will find a great purpose for this book and those who wished to broaden their understanding or improve their visual experience when viewing certain photographs will find this book useful as well. Masters like Diane Arbus, Nathaniel West, Stiechenm, Alfred Steglietz, Edward Weston, Moholy-Nagy (to wit a few) were brought up and whose style and technique were discussed and pitted against. Whether you are a practicing photographer or a mere lover of beautiful pieces caught in a neat cut of time by a nanosecond press of a button, one may refer to this book as an academic and at the same time enlightening reference on the practice and purpose of photography.

I have earmarked some passages that I think were worth a thought or two.

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“Whatever the camera records is a disclosure—whether it is imperceptible, fleeting parts of movement, an order that natural vision is incapable of perceiving or a “heightened reality”, or simply the elliptical way of seeing.”  

 “In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge out notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images.”—In Plato’s Cave,

“A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs—especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past—are incitements to reverie.”

“When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.”

“The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitring, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.”

“ .... paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.”

“Photographs are .... clouds of fantasy and pellets of information.”

“There is one thing that a photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.” – Robert Frank, from chapter Photographic Evangels 

March 09, 2013