GSA in San Diego; Photo Sage Michelle Vignes, 86, Dies
Oct. 29, 2012 – Volume 12, Number 15
IN THIS ISSUE: The Scariest Costume – A 2012 Ballot
1. ON THE CALENDAR:
Press Contacts for AHPA’S 140th in San Francisco, Gerontological Society’s 65th Meeting in San Diego, American Anthropological Association’s 111th in San Francisco.
2. REMEMBERING PHOTO SAGE, DEAD AT 86
1. ON THE CALENDAR
*** With baseball over (Yea, Giants! But sniff, sniff for the end of the National Passtime for 2012), the conference season is now in full swing. The American Public Health Association (APHA), is meeting in San Francisco and is leading in the stats with its 140th annual conclave. The conference, which runs through Halloween day, opened Sunday with a hot opening general session on “Wellness and Prevention Across the Life Span,” including Gail Sheehy, whom we spotted later signing copies of her tome, Passages in Caregiving: Turning Chaos Into Confidence (2010). Sheehy has about a mile-long line of public health folks, and we hope she won’t need the writer’s-cramp version of Tommy John surgery to get he back on the author’s mound.
Reporters can contact AHPA’s press honcho, Audrey Pernik while she’s in San Francisco at 415-348-4524; cell202-297-8820, to find out how to get releases and access to the conference program only. You can also search the APHA Annual Meeting site.
If today is cutting it too close for you, here are two more conference coming up this coming month, logging in at 65 year and 111 years. The GSA info below includes how to search their sessions online and connect with experts even if you can’t get to San Diego.
*** GSA CELEBRATES 65TH IN SAN DIEGO, NOV. 15-18: The Gerontological Society of America (GSA) will be at the San Diego Convention Center starting a week before Thanksgiving and running through Sunday. Reporters can sign up for a complimentary press registration by contacting GSA’s Todd Kluss, at tkluss@geron.org. But if you can’t get to that sunny California clime, read on to see how you can search the online program of over 500 papers and sessions for new research and sources you can contact for stories you’re developing. Kluss will be able to send you the contact information for presenters you can’t simply find via an online search.
Working in cooperation with the Journalist Network on Generations (publisher if GBO) and New America Media, GSA has developed three post-election media lunch briefings for those who will be with us. They include:
* Thurs., Nov. 15, “Will America Strengthen Retirement Security-Or Weaken It in 2013?” Speakers: Eric Kingson, Professor of Social Work, Syracuse University, Founding Co-Director of Social Security Works and Co-Chair the Strengthen Social Security Coalition. Fay Lomax Cook, Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research, Professor, Human Development & Social Policy, Northwestern University. Chair/Moderator: Cheryl Matheis, AARP’s senior vice president of policy.
*Fri., Nov. 16, “Family Caregiving-The Elephant in America’s Health Care Bed.” (It will present recent research, recommendations and how caregivers can get needed support and advice.) Speakers: Susan Reinhard, Senior Vice President and Director of the AARP Public Policy Institute. Peggye Dilworth-Anderson, Interim Co-Director of the University of North Carolina Institute on Aging and Co-Lead of the Aging and Diversity Program. Chair: Eileen Beal, author and freelance journalists on aging, Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
*Sat., Nov. 17 — “Longevity’s Gaps and Gains: Who Gets to Live Long and Prosper–and Who Doesn’t.” (On the shocking recent report from the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on an Aging Society revealing significant differences in U.S. life expectancy by race and educational level are widening.) Speakers: S. Jay Olshansky, Professor, University of Illinois, Chicago, School of Public Health; Research Associate, Center on Aging, University of Chicago and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. James S. Jackson, Director and Research Professor, Institute for Social Research; Daniel Katz Distinguished University, Professor of Psychology. Steven N. Austad, Professor & Interim Director, Barshop Institute for Longevity & Aging Studies, University of Texas Health Science Center Dept. of Cellular & Structural Biology. Chair: Paul Kleyman, Director, Ethnic Elders Newsbeat, New America Media; National Coordinator, Journalists Network on Generations.
Here’s how to search the GSA 2012 conference program:
Go to http://gsa2012.abstractcentral.com/planner.jsp. The two main things to click on the left side are “Search” and “Browse.”
Click “Browse” too bring up a calendar of each conference day. Click on the day you want, and you will see every session title hyperlinked to the conference room location – and then click “View presentation” to read the abstract paragraph describing the session.
Click “Search” to shop for sessions in different subject areas, or “Browse” to view sessions by day and time.IMPORTANT — You DO NOT have to fill in all the spaces on the form that comes up, such as “Final ID/Program Number”” or “Session Code.” Also, DO NOT use the “Keyword” field. If you want to enter keywords, I recommend using either the “Abstract/Presentation Title Keyword Search” or “Abstract/Presentation Body Keyword Search” fields. When you click “Search” at the bottom, you will get a list of sessions with the word(s) you entered on the previous screen. For each one, just click “View Pres” (for Presentation) to see the abstract.
If you find a good one, you can also search the names of the presenters to see any related sessions of papers they are doing at the conference. It’s important to know that with 500 odd sessions and papers at the conference, you can miss a lot of relevant presentations that might not have the keyword one thinks of for a search.
*** 6,000 ANTHROPOLOGISTS IN SAN FRANCISCO, NOV. 14-18: The American Anthropological Association (the AAA that can get you around the globe, but not tow your car back) will hold its 111th Annual Meeting at the San Francisco Hilton. It’s always a great treasury of stories and contacts on aging, and I wish it weren’t the same week as GSA. For press information contact Joslyn Osten via e-mail, josten@aaanet.org or call 703.528.1902×1171.
REMEMBRANCE OF PHOTO PIONEER MICHELLE VIGNES
By Paul Kleyman
SAN FRANCISCO–The past few months have had me reeling with the life-and-death events one expects in one’s later years, but can never completely prepare for when they arrive. The new life in my life is James Dylan Hardy, my grandson, born in Los Angeles on 8/8/12, a lucky number say my Asian friend, but a date not quite soon enough for him to meet my patron saint of truth in art, Michelle Vignes.
Michelle, my friend and mentor of four decades, died in San Francisco on October 4. She was 86 and succumbed to complications from lung cancer. You likely don’t know her name, unless you are among those from around the world who love her photography or have even journeyed to her jewel box of a house on a steep street in the city’s Diamond Heights neighborhood. Photographers from the renown Marc Riboud to budding talents sent by Michelle’s admirers would pay homage to a photographer’s photographer, to her patient eye on every shade of the human condition, to her pungent critique of, well, practically everything.
Assisted Cartier-Bresson and Capa at Magnum
The notable facts of her career are well documented in the photographic realm. Michelle started in photography as an assistant and then photo editor at Magnum in its legendary formative years (1953-57), working for the Robert Capa, Shim and Henri Carrier-Bresson, among the greatest names in photojournalism. The latter taught her to tell a story in a sequence of frozen moments. Later there were assignments for Time, Life, Vogue, Newsweek, Paris Match, as well as for smaller publishing venues she believed in, such as Pacific News Service, the parent organization of what became New America Media, where I’m now an editor.
Among her honors were the Chevalier des Arts des Lettres from France’s Minister of Culture and the Oakland Museum’s Dorothea Lange Award. She was a dedicated teacher in France and the U.S. and co-founded the International Fund for Documentary Photography and San Francisco’s Fotovision to support the work of emerging documentary photographers, the world’s fly-on-the-wall image-catchers, who often struggle for sustenance they need to give form to truth.
In recent years, Stanford University collected Michelle’s photographs of the early years of the Black Panther Party. And in 2003, as her hands became increasingly arthritic and unable to press a shutter, Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, archived her entire body of work.
For all of the honors and accomplishments that usually stack up in obituaries, though, such accolades hardly reveal the core of what makes someone like Michelle both grander and deeper than our ordinary selves.
Although you’re not apt to have known of Michelle, her photographs invite you to share her precious moments, motes of time you can live with her as if you had a reserved seat behind her iris. You can almost feel the reflex in her shutter finger at the instant it stopped emotion-in a face or maybe a place-that may well catch your breath.
Even her landscapes and city visions are peopled where none can be seen. From her book Bay Area Blues (1993), an arc of ramshackle buildings in Oakland curves along railroad tracks in the last light before the night hour, the only sign of life a small, oval sign topped with a star announcing Pete Stella’s Soul Food Inn. There’s life here. Or a desolate road stretches out through the prairie grass of North Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation under a sky that broods for the fate of people you’ll meet as you turn the pages of Indiens d’Amerique published in France in 2003.
Six decades ago, it was her visual intelligence that advanced Michelle quickly from her temporary assistant’s job to a position as photo editor at Magnum. She was there the fateful day the call came that the photo agency’s co-founder Robert Capa was killed while covering the First War in Indochina. Although a globetrotting adventurer who only popped into the Paris office now and then, he took a keen interest in the development of Magnum and was especially encouraging to the eager young assistant. For Cartier-Bresson, she eventually handled the editing, printing and sale of his photos, such as those he took in 1957 of the Soviet Union-the first images allowed by a Western photographer in the years after Josef Stalin’s death.
The Kennedys, Che and Her Deciding “Moment”
Cartier-Bresson became her greatest inspiration, as well as her biggest source of aggravation, when she decided to try her own hand at photography. She always that editing his work taught her how to tell a story, but also she from him the magic of waiting, of capturing the “moment,” the deceptively simple abracadabra he used to explain the art in his craft. After she left Magnum in 1957, he helped her get hired as a photo editor at UNESCO in Paris and then as a photo coordinator at the United Nations in New York. If prompted just a bit, she love to tell of her U.N. days, when she would meet the likes of John F. and Bobby Kennedy (President Kennedy was sallow and remote, Michelle recalled), as well as Che Guevara (“He was so sexy, all the women wanted to get near him,” she told me.)
However exciting those occasions were when she’d escort such dignitaries to the Secretary General’s office, herding the U.N.’s corps of press photographers for scheduled shoots and managing their competitive egos was not Michelle’s idea of career development. It was 1966 and time for a change, time to take the plunge and become a photographer. And it was time to find a new and more nurturing environment for her than Manhattan. She’s been to San Francisco with a former boyfriend and ended up wedding herself to the place a poet famously called the cool gray city of love.
Through the decades Michelle documented Vietnam War protesters burning draft cards and refusing induction into the United States Army, the early rise of the Black Panther Party, the Rolling Stones’ disastrous concert at Altamont), daily life and whimsical ceramic art in the Mexican village of Ocumicho, the wailing nightlife of the Bay Area blues scene, and the devout gospel tradition persevering in small and storefront churches around San Francisco.
“Tenacious” doesn’t begin to describe Michelle Vignes. She began documenting the tribulations of Native American with the occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. Then, in the winter of 1973 this slight blond woman with a thick French accent and a limp went far beyond the usual French fascination with the Indiens d’Amerique. She turned up in North Dakota determined to witness the American Indian Movement’s (AIM) occupation of the 1890 massacre site at Wounded Knee. After eight decades of frustration for Ogalala Sioux, AIM leaders, fed up with tribal corruption and the betrayal of treaties by the United States government, declared the reservation to be a sovereign nation and occupied Wounded Knee.
The February air in the Upper Midwest, where I come from, doesn’t need wind-chill readings to be cruel. The crunch of icy snow alone can bite at the edges of your ears all the way down to your bone. Michelle once recalled to me one of the proud moments of her life as a documentary photographer, the incident in which she literally broke the ice and for the first time and got the protest leaders to accept her as a journalist who was serious about their cause.
They ignored her at first. Then, one day, Michelle, purse hanging at her side and a camera slung around her neck, found herself slipping and half falling against her car door as she tried getting in, and she would find out why only later.
Unstoppable
Decades earlier, when she was only five, the bones of her hips and legs had become frozen, more from the treatment than the disease. Some have reported that it was polio, but Michelle said it resulted from a general infection. The remedy then, before antibiotics, caused her to spend a year in a full body cast. Unable to grow with the normal articulation of joints from childhood athleticism, her bones fused together.
Orthopedic medicine was still primitive in 1931, even for those like her affluent family. Later attempts at surgery fell shorter than her permanently shortened leg. Soon after her last unsuccessful operation at age 15, Michelle’s physician stopped by and, finding her inconsolably despondent, asked what she’d have liked to do had the procedure worked. Michelle recounted to me over 60 years later that she was incredulous. How could he ask such a thing to a child steeped in such despair? Bitterly, she replied, “I want to swim, I want to ride a bicycle and dance like the other children.” And her doctor, she would recount, changed her life by simply asking, “What’s stopping you?”
Nothing would stop her again, even the icy parking spot at Pine Ridge in 1973, as Michelle slipped again and eventually maneuvered herself into her car. She’d noticed a small, impassive group of Indians watching from across the road. She did not expect them to help, and they didn’t. Only later did she learn why.
Following her skirmish with the ice, Michelle found that suddenly the AIM leaders were welcoming and began answering her questions. Some time later one of the elders explained that as their group sat watching her from across that road, one of the younger men suggested they go help her into the car. No, said the elder, we’ll help if she asks for it. They observed not a damsel in distress, but a women of honest and relentless grit. Unbeknownst to Michelle, she hadn’t merely earned their respect, she fought, ice and door, and won it outright. They saw that nothing, nothing would stop this little woman with the French accent and the limp.
When Indiens d’Amerique was published in 2003 three decades later, not only did American Indian Movement (AIM) leader Dennis Banks write the introduction, but he and several others flew to Paris for the opening reception of gallery exhibition mounted with the book’s release. To her surprise, Cartier-Bresson, who seldom went out then, only a year before his death at 95, arrived at the event, where Banks and his group blessed Michelle and her 30 years of documenting their struggles with ceremonial benedictions of drums, chants, many hues and feathers. On that autumn evening in Paris, Michelle who was perpetually surrounded by new textures, sounds and rhythms, who was ever wrapped in shades of purple, scarlet, rust, ochre, blue, green, gold and bone was very much in her element. Sadly for Americans, U.S. book publishers rejected issuing an English edition here because, they told her, Americans weren’t interested in the Indians anymore.
Although I only know of that magical Parisian night from her later descriptions, I was fortune to accompany Michelle at times, especially when she needed a male escort to some of her dicier shooting locations in the 1980s and early 1990s. There was the truck stop outside of Sacramento, where she explored the lives of America’s commercial road culture. Truckers could find food, showers, a variety of entertainment and a mobile community. One she photographed when I was not along proudly and rather weirdly (her word) showed off long-barreled his pistol.
Several times I accompanied her to Eli’s Mile High Club in Oakland. Once inside the club all welcomed her like a sister, but she knew enough to protect herself from the car to the club door and back. That’s where she needed me or another friend. Inside the club, she would swing her Leica to rhythms. Moving now and then among the bumps and grinds of Eli’s, she’d lift her small 35mm over her head or out at an angle in an impromptu photo dance. “Maybe I’ll get something,” she’d shrug.
Oh, she got plenty, although usually with endless patience and her eye in the viewfinder.
Here, in the ebony and ivory tones of a wee-small-hours mood, a man with deeply furrowed brow and trim gray beard along his jaw line forever listens, eyes closed, to a tune only he can hear as he delicately fingers imagined keys on the white tabletop. Michelle lets you smell his boozy reverie, with as much poignancy as humor. For this supplicant to the blues, forever in his dream lost and relived, she composed as much respect as one might find in one of her elegant Portuguese bullfighters, who do not kill in California, in Harry Belafonte or Marlon Brando schmoozing with leaders of AIM.
Michelle Vignes was a photographer, but her art was stopping time. There’s AIM co-founder Russell Means seated, arching forward, eyes as wide as one of Michelle’s cats listening for the next bark. In one of her signature photographs, Dennis Banks sits cross-legged in a grassy field, his native braids tightly wrapped and a pipe tucked in one corner of his mouth as he gazes off in deep contemplation. Behind him a stand of five teepees rise on the prairie as they might have done a century before; only the front end of a car turns the clock forward to a gravid moment in the late 20th century.
New Life
In losing very special people, the large personalities in our lives, I’ve found it sometimes too easy to default to quirky anecdotes when in reminiscing with mutual friends. I learned only to bring French wine to one of her rich and savory dinners, if I wanted her approving nod; and I never did master cutting a fine cheese correctly, always a occasion for one of her cutting reprimands. After dinner, we’d spend many a Saturday evening in front of her beloved “TV5Monde,” French news, with the most beautiful anchors and news sets on the planet, and which Michelle didn’t always care to translate for this non-speaker of her native tongue And she adored watching, of all things, competitions on the American professional bullriding circuit. Michelle knew the names of all the top contenders, and she frequently remarked on which were the more sexy. (She’d impishly insist that the best riders are the Brazilians.) With Michelle, I learned about the longest eight seconds anyone can endure short of being bucked and thrown by an earthquake.
Remembering lost friends with shared humor is essential; we attract and sketch one another at the odd angles of our personalities. But the friendships that endure for years and decades fill in more deeply than the caricature of mere reminiscence. Michelle preserves for me and so many others through the intelligence and imagination behind her shining eyes and, yes, too, her sharp tongue.
My last moments with her were at her bedside a little over a week before she died. Michelle was weary and talking was a struggle for her that afternoon. After searching awkwardly for news to share or things to say, I simply held her hand. After a while I remembered a photograph I’d brought of my new grandson, James.
Michelle had seen my daughter, Shana, come into the world and grow, and was especially eager to hear how she was doing with her baby. But it was always challenging to present Michelle with something like a family photo. For a friend silent chill of tolerance might fog a sentimental image. But not this time. I held up the photo of little James in blue, his eyes dreamily closed and tiny arms tucked at expressive angles. And Michelle emitted a deep sigh, “Oh.” Such pleasure in that moment, such new life.
Rest in peace my friend.