Beautiful truths and ugly realities

A watery bird paradise, all-time favorite nonfiction titles, new exhibits, and the photographer of a city that communism left behind.

Great Egret, Wood River Delta, Chiloquin, Oregon, 2018

BIRDS

Wood River, wider than a mile

The Wood River Delta is a broad expanse of marshes and lakes in traditional Klamath and Modoc territory in southern Oregon. It is the most exciting place to observe and photograph birds that I’ve experienced. I made the above photograph on our first trip there in 2018 while in a canoe steered by Gerald Hill, a Klamath friend of Barbara’s from medical school. (Gerald was chairman of the board of Native American Health Center in Oakland when they hired her as medical director in 1984, a job she held for over twenty-five years.) We were paddling through a narrow channel in the delta when we turned a corner and suddenly encountered this Great Egret. Gerald, who is a hunter, approached the bird in stealth and silence, and I was able to get a few shots before it flew away. I’ve always liked the soft colors of the early sky against the statuesque white egret with its sharp yellow-orange bill, and I love reliving that morning on the water. The photograph was shown in exhibits connected my 2018 book, Year of the Birds, and is one of just a handful of pictures from that earlier work that I included in my recent book, Aves.

---

EXHIBITS

IMAGINARY SPONGES (above) is one of two quilts by Barbara Ramsey that appear in the wonderful Burst of Color exhibit now showing at Northwind Arts downtown gallery through mid-February. Seventy works of thirty-seven fiber artists are included. Jeanette Best Gallery, 701 Water Street, Port Townsend, WA. Photo by Brian Goodman.

COLLECTIVE VISIONS GALLERY in Bremerton opened their annual juried exhibition of Washington state artists on Saturday, the 13th. My photograph, Red-tailed Tropicbird, will it be on view there until February 23. CVS gallery, 331 Pacific Avenue, Bremerton, WA.

---

We welcome your comments!

Amartya Sen (left) and Oliver Sachs

WHAT IS BARBARA THINKING?

My all-time favorite books of nonfiction

THESE ARE THE books that have had most profound impact on my understanding of the world over the course of my life. Nonfiction is often an evanescent genre, especially in the sciences, which are my favorite. I’ve attempted to select books that transcend their times and have limited myself to one book per author.

1. Intelligent Life in the Universe by Iosif Shklovsky and Carl Sagan. Many are familiar with Lily Tomlin’s one-woman show, The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe. Far fewer know of this equally great if less amusing work by a Soviet-era astronomer and astrophysicist. When I read it in the early 1970’s, I was a fan of Star Trek, not the real stars. This book changed all that. It was the closest thing I had to the James Webb telescope.

2. Plagues and Peoples by William H. McNeill. In the late 1970’s, I went to medical school where I mainly learned about disease. This book blew my mind by combining a thorough understanding of world history with an up-to-the-minute knowledge of disease and demographics. Although now outdated in some of its particulars, McNeill set the standard for writing this kind of global history.

3. The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould. My favorite of Gould’s many wonderful books is an early and meticulously documented account of how scientists can be as racist, xenophobic, and misogynist as any other bunch of yahoos. As a physician, I liked to think that scientific and pseudo-scientific ideas are readily separable, but that’s a soothing myth—you can’t just “trust the science.” Gould deploys his authorial elegance to show how scrupulous attention to the facts can overturn bad ideas. Stephen, we miss you.

4. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. No one has ever explained the subjective side of illness better. This early set of essays is a great introduction to his knowledge, style, and exquisite ability to explain what seems beyond explanation. But Sack’s greatest achievement is his work as a whole, including Seeing Voices and An Anthropologist on Mars. His exceptional output continued until his death in 2015. I regularly look for new doctor-writers to whom I can turn, but Sacks remains unique.

5. Ecological Imperialism by Alfred W. Crosby. While I was accustomed to thinking of European expansion primarily as a set of social, political, and cultural encounters, Crosby introduced me to the biological implications far beyond infectious disease. Published in 1986, it foreshadows the better-known Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, which came out in 1997. Crosby is less speculative than Diamond and more interested in the details of history and biology. Plus he’s a solid writer who can quote Nabokov as well as Darwin.

6. The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen. I confess to being a fawning groupie of this Nobel Prize winning Bengali economist and philosopher. Sen has written books on politics, development, social justice, and public health, but this accessible and warm collection of essays concerns Indian identity and intellectual pluralism. He familiarizes us with ancient traditions of tolerance for religious and ethnic differences and sees dynamic public debate as a way to strengthen traditions that span from Buddha to Tagore and beyond. Sadly, India’s current identity politics remind me of our own. We could all benefit from Sen’s concept of identity as a multifaceted process, not a singular category—as something one creates, not merely discovers.

7. Our Inner Ape by Frans de Waal. While Gould kindled my interest in evolution in general, de Waal made me realize that our kinship with apes is the corner of evolution that most fascinates me. Inner Ape came out in 2005, and he regularly produces new work on additional facets of primatology. He is thoughtful and willing to criticize scientific work that falls short of his standards, but gentle on the general reader who needs encouragement to understand the complexities of the subject. And he’s a terrific speaker; check him out on YouTube.

8. Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler. Spoken language is humanity’s greatest invention. While genetics has become increasingly important to our understanding of human prehistory, the study of languages over the past 15,000 years offers historical evidence of a different sort. This book chronicles the changes in grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of specific languages as their speakers have migrated, invaded, been invaded, immigrated, emigrated, and otherwise mixed—a wild ride.

9. Other Minds: the Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith. This guy isn’t a marine biologist or neuroscientist. He’s a philosopher interested in the human mind. Oh, and he’s also an Australian bloke who loves to scuba. Put them together and you have a book that covers both invertebrates and metaphysics. He paddles around the ocean offering observations about the natural world that permit insight into the fabric of thought itself. And he writes about evolution and natural history with a rare clarity of expression.

10. An Immense World by Ed Yong. My most recent non-fiction read is a comprehensive summary of research into animal perception. It emphasizes those senses we don’t have: echolocation, electrical field detection, magnetoreception, the ability to detect ultraviolet light, etc. I’m as interested in mind expansion as any other aging hippie, but understanding the already expanded minds of my fellow creatures is better than mushrooms (not that I’m against the mushrooms). Yong also introduced me to the concept of Umwelt, the sensory bubble created by each animal’s set of perceptions. I’ve always been a little suspicious of the word “reality” and now I can better see its limitations.

11. There’s one more I have to add—at the 11th hour: Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior by Judith Martin. When it comes to good behavior, my sisters and I grew up semi-feral. And I’m not talking salad forks. I’m talking about how to apologize when you’ve hurt someone’s feelings and how to say “no” without being rude. At 711 pages, it’s really a reference book to be consulted as needed, but so hilarious that any random page will make you laugh out loud. After a day of neurology and plagues and imperialism, we can all use a good laugh.   —Barbara Ramsey

    You can find Barbara’s all-time best fiction list here.

    ---

Viktor Kolář’ (left) with Marc Riboud and Michelle Vignes, Mother Jones International Documentary Photography Awards, 1991.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Man of marble

“Ostrava is Dickens’s world come to life. It is the ghost of the communist state, which preserved the Industrial Revolution in a time capsule. It is also the unlikely home of one of the finest photographers in Europe.” –Frank Viviano

BRUTALISM. That word aptly describes so much about the Czech city of Ostrava. The rows of concrete housing projects built during the Soviet occupation. The coal mines and steel plants symbolizing communism’s muscular industrialism and the harsh conditions of the workers who toiled there. The Nazi’s murder the city’s Jewish population during WWII and the massacre of German-speaking civilians following the war. The punishments for deviation from dogma, including those meted out to Viktor Kolář’s father, a filmmaker, and later to Viktor himself.

As a photographer, Viktor Kolář’s great achievement, over six decades, has been to convey the humanity of Ostrava’s people amidst the brutal suffering and humiliations he has shared with them. His home is a city of 280,000 in the Czech Republic, bordered by Germany and Poland to the north and east, and within striking distance of Moscow. In 1968, Moscow did strike, ending the Prague Spring, a brief attempt at liberalization. In its wake, Viktor emigrated to Canada for five years, during which his dexterity as a street photographer caught the attention of Cornell Capa¹ among others. Despite Capa’s cautioning, Viktor returned to Ostrava, where he was literally forced underground, clandestinely photographing coal miners.

From its central location, Czech art and photography also absorbed the influences of the movements swirling through the past century—from Germany (Bauhaus modernism), France (Surrealism), and Russia (Constructivism).² Viktor’s major influence was Henri Cartier-Bresson, known for a dynamic style of street photography he famously described as seeking the “decisive moment.” More than any photographer I’ve known, Viktor also embodies a distinguishing feature of social documentary photography, an embedded, intensive engagement with the subjects of his pictures. “The people I photograph have secret resources,” Viktor told a reporter years ago, “secret mechanisms that keep them sane, that keep them going.”

I MET VIKTOR only once, when he traveled to San Francisco in 1991 to receive an award and grant from the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography, which I then directed. I later commissioned a story from Frank Viviano to accompany an essay of Viktor’s photographs in Mother Jones. Recently, I’ve been in email contact with Viktor, now in his eighties, who describes Ostrava as experiencing a less-than-successful privatization of the major industries—the last coal was mined in 1994. He says democracy initiated a process of “growing up” from the paternalism of Big-Brother communism. “People learned to take responsibility for their lives, a painful process that is far from being finished,” he says. Consumerism has spread. A threat, he suggests, now comes from the oligarchs who have taken control of the media, but a new generation is learning to defend its freedom and self-expression. As dedicated to his fellow Ostravans as he as always been, he remains sober about its prospects. As he told Viviano thirty years ago, “Sentimentality will not save us.”

Editor’s Note: The title, Man of Marble, is a reference to the 1977 film by Polish director, Andrejez Wajda, about the fall from grace of a bricklayer made a hero by communist propagandists and a young filmmaker who later uncovers his story. Viktor reminds me of that brave filmmaker. On my web site, I’ve reproduced Frank Viviano’s essay from 1994, after he visited Viktor in Ostrava, which is an incisive observation of the changes in central Europe shortly after the fall of communism. I’ve included as a small selection of Viktor’s photographs, with his commentary. For more pictures, I urge you to visit Viktor’s web site.

1. Cornell Capa was a photographer and founder of the International Center of Photography in New York. He was the brother of Robert Capa, a co-founder with Henri Cartier-Bresson of the Magnum photo agency who photographed the Spanish Civil War and battles of WWII, including D-day. He was killed in 1954 when he stepped on a mine while covering the war in Vietnam.

2. There are many superb Czech photographers. I’ve encountered three working in the documentary tradition, including Viktor. Antonin Kratochvil photographed stories for me at Mother Jones, including a darker and more profound depiction of Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution than the happy images saturating the major media at the time. I once met Josef Koudelka at a gallery in San Francisco, and have a photograph from his book Gypsies in my living room.