Backgrounds, the New Foregrounds

This essay is published in Medium.com, along with others

I used to marvel at groups of tourists who like to photograph everything, but nothing so much as themselves standing in front of postcard destinations; the Pantheon, the Louvre, the 9/11 Memorial, Taj Mahal, White House to name an obvious start to an obviously endless list. Anything worth photographing is, to some, worth standing in front of for a photograph. I even started photographing tourists photographing groups of tourists in Europe, my overly simplified idea of a meta tourist photo, but really just doing what the tourists were doing…squared. 

Or ironically. Or maybe just doing the same thing.

What intrigued me was the tension between foreground and background. Often these photos have a relatively small foreground figure, not wanting to occlude the all-important background. So which is it? Is it a portrait of the human, or a documentation of the icon behind them? It is, of course, above all proof; proof that that human visited that icon. It’s not entirely unlike hostage photos with that day’s newspaper acting as ‘proof of life’, as the police procedurals say.

But these aren’t hostage photos in any traditional sense (except possibly being hostage to the photographer). Smiling, arms around each other, sometimes mugging for the camera, these are today’s anti-hostages. The photos are beyond ‘proof of life’, they are ‘proof of the good life’! They are fodder for the ‘bragging industrial complex’ which involves social media and photos of enviable locations. You only need to look at celebs posting their quarantine Instagram photos on their yachts, island getaways or remote mountain houses to get how backgrounds can be powerfully convicting, at least for the tone deaf. “Proof of the Good Life” indeed.

A true ‘selfie’ has a field of view only as large as one’s arm can reach, favoring foreground, which is, of course, the whole point; these are above all self-portraits. Or are they? Beyond the posing, the pursed lips, hip cocks, hair muss and the ‘rock on’ hand sign (among all the other things 12-year-olds have appropriated for their maddeningly stereotypical selfies) there is often the celebrity selfie, the party selfie, the dinner selfie, the concert selfie, all part of the culture of socially condoned narcissism. In the generation of ‘pics or it didn’t happen’ these are ‘pics it happened…but without you’, proclaiming innocence as in “how you could not be interested in what I’m doing”. These are not so much pictures as much as they are taunts, and there is a well-developed glossary of jealousy, envy, schadenfreude beyond FOMO*. 

Selfie Sticks (dubbed Narcissticks, Staffs of Narcissus or Solipsisticks by some) ostensibly expand the view to shrink the human and widen the background, but really they are there to annoy just about everyone not in the picture. Milan, always a large step beyond our own metropolis, has banned selfie sticks as promoting anti-social behavior. Perhaps the only thing that Versailles, Disneyland and Apple have in common is banning selfie sticks. Why do we hate them as much as we hate passengers who refuse to remove their backpacks in crowded subways? 

In a judgement-free world we might even admire the design; but we don’t give design awards to guns for the same reason we probably won’t see a Selfie Stick in the MoMA collection. You might think the added distance would allow the background to dominate, but somehow it exaggerates the centrality of the users. They become the sun to the phone camera’s earth. They can feign nonchalance or pretend there is someone who cares enough to be their cameraperson. 

Rather than being like the rugged reporters who became camera operator, sound person and on-air talent all at once (NY1 is the first place I noticed this, saving 2/3 of the cost of a news team), they are more like the worst American Idol tryouts; earnestly believing in their talent, but are really there for comic relief. 

I first noticed Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs (and failed to buy one when they were almost affordable) during his Architecture phase; large scale, large format, out-of-focus, black and white images of iconic modern architecture (or perhaps Modern Architecture). Sugimoto would say that the idea was to see just how far he could dematerialize (‘erosion testing’ is his phrase) these icons and still maintain their legibility and power. 

I see these as explorations of the foreground/background discussion, with Sugimoto proposing a reconciliation of the foreground and background; pushing the foreground beyond the focal plane into the background without obscuring it. It’s a game of hide and seek, in plain sight. It forces the viewer to fill in the details from the barest reminder of the big picture, engaging the viewer’s memory as an essential part of the art. It would be hard to imagine what someone would think of these images if they didn’t know the objects he photographed. 

Using a large format camera to capture out of focus buildings isn’t just dichotomous or ironic; it creates a highly specific lack of clarity. Specific Lack of Clarity (the working title for my memoir) situates these photographs in a world of their own, despite being very much of our world. They are utterly concrete (literally, in some cases) and utterly evanescent. They are filled with illegible detail, pushing the viewer back from the picture plane. They are specifically unspecific.

Nicholson Baker inverts this idea, somehow, in Books as Furniture, his hilarious 25-year-old essay exploring the background. He scours common catalogs like The Company Store, J. Crew, Pottery Barn, and just about every mail order catalog of the pre-Amazon days, analyzing the  prop books in the backgrounds of photos of models wearing pajamas or whatever, in those poses we all know well but have never imitated. After finally extracting a title from the images (which is occasionally difficult detective work) he heads to a large public library to borrow, and read, the prop book. They are, perhaps unsurprisingly, often quite old (early 20th century, late 19th century) and utterly obscure; at least one book hadn’t been borrowed since 1948.

His meticulous, and deadpan, analysis of the meaning of a fractional detail in these commercial (and usually quite cheesy) photos generously attributes intentionality onto the choices that we know were just a generic “place books here” kind of art direction. [n.b. if you try to find these photos now you will see the books-by-the-foot have been replaced by blank books, books showing only the fore edge and Moleskine like sketchbooks posing as literature] 

It is a tribute to the power of a particular kind of human brain, that we can make connections and inject meaning into chance adjacencies. I’ve written about “birthday neighbors”, positing that famous architects born on the same or adjacent days have a genuine and complex relationship to each other. Random dates engendering thematic implications is more than just a 6-degrees analysis; like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson each dying hours apart on the same July 4th, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, more than 500 miles apart, the ‘coincidence’ explanation begs to be reconsidered. 

It may be that Nicholson Baker is using this essay to play with the idea of subject and object, not precisely in the grammatical sense (which I admit I can never remember). I guess “they are standing in front of the Mona Lisa” makes they the subject, and in front of the Mona Lisa the object, so it might be grammatical as well as descriptive. 

Subject/Object is probably the grammar equivalent of visual concepts like Figure/Ground or Positive/Negative Space or Foreground/Background. These are not ‘black and white’, or ‘left and right’ or ‘good and bad’. While we can impose meaning on virtually anything (‘left’ in Italian is ‘sinistra’ or sinister, while right is ‘destra’, which also means clever) there are more significant relationships at work above. 

If ‘foreground music’ is music you are actually listening to, then ‘background music’ is environmental and simply a soundtrack to the main activity, whatever that might be. Muzak  (whose HQ we designed and about whom I know way too much) is the emblematic background company. They began life as ‘wired radio’ when radio was not yet universal, or simple, and transmitting over the electrical grid was effectively an early version of cable tv. 

Piped music gave public spaces (hotels, department stores, and yes, elevators) a calming background soundtrack. Speakers were often hidden among potted plants as Muzak became known as potted palm music, in addition to the elevator music moniker that stuck. Elevators were apparently loci of anxiety, in part because the skyscraper was extending elevator rides to 50 stories and more, and in part because, as today, standing together in a tiny room with strangers, increases social anxiety.

In fact the invention of the modern elevator (ancient elevator hoists date back to BCE times)  by Elisha Otis, was actually the invention of the safety brake. At the 1852 World’s Fair in New York, Otis was hoisted on a rope-supported platform high above the crowd. At the top of the lift he was given a saber (or axe, depending on the telling) and slashed the rope as the crowd gasped in horror. The platform barely dropped as the safety brake below the platform locked to the rails. It is a bit of industrial age American genius, addressing the psychology of the elevator as well as the safety mechanics. And the performance was utterly P.T. Barnum, who in fact choreographed the unveiling of Otis’s invention. 

The idea of a soundtrack for life, a background of music, might have started with Erik Satie’s Furniture Music of 1917, six decades before Brian Eno’s Ambient Music. What seems so much a part of life today, music everywhere, had to be invented. Satie presaged an explosion of media; vinyl record albums (named for the bound ‘books’ of sleeves of 78 rpm disks necessary to play a whole piece) featured the entire Nutcracker Suite a few years earlier; radio would improve exponentially over the next 10 years; and because the Victrola was mechanical, not electrical, they were technically portable, though a bit heavier than a Walkman. 

Music’s move from foreground to background, or at least from concert to soundtrack was driven by technology, much as technology had changed music in the earliest radio days; big sounds and brass could punch through the low-fi of early radio, staying in the foreground within a lo-res tech environment that tended to subsume more subtle music. 

To say that technology has entirely altered our relationships with others is to understate the effect of social media, smart phones, broadband, and the ability for virtually anyone to produce incredibly creditable media on the fly. That was while all of us were running around, working, traveling, eating out, going to shows, seeing art in museums, and enjoying all the other parts of life we have, for the moment, jettisoned to avoid dying of coronavirus. A nation, practically an entire world, of isolated citizens trapped at home but still armed with phones, computers and fast internet have taken to a raft of free apps to connect. 

Where we used to revel in genuine exotic contexts, we now have only the domestic interior to background us in our frequent Zooms, FaceTimes, Teams, Webex, Facebook Live and whatever else we are using to maintain an emotional connection to others. And because we are virtually all stuck at home we now all get to see the interiors of not just our colleagues thoughts, but their bedrooms, study’s, attics, living rooms and, in a few unfortunate cases, bathrooms. 

Zoom has a virtual background option, which allows you to place any image (or one of their own scenes) ‘behind’ you. It’s a tricky bit of programming that allows this to work, and one with limited success in some cases. One house-proud friend, who insisted an image of the exterior of his home be the background to his zooms, subjected his son to being ‘absorbed’ into the image whenever he leaned back. It was something out of Terminator, with the metal dude morphing or passing through solids. He looked partially submerged, edges losing definition and ultimately disappearing from the call while still there. 

These malfunctions are, of course, entirely visible to the caller (should the glance at the tiny window with their own image) and begs the question of why it’s so important to humblebrag at the expense of the call’s foreground. In this case it’s an interesting insight into the internal priorities of the zoomer. House = important, son = maybe not so much. 
OK Zoomer.

Another zoomer was travelogueing through Italy while on the call. This was more like a fun version of the dreaded 1960’s ‘dad travel slideshow’, without the narration and feeling of being trapped, but with the surprise of being rocketed around some places we all love and all can’t visit in person. 

I’ve noticed a lot of singular bits of art in some zooms; a particular call had large black and white photos of the zoomer’s personal jams. One was a Dieter Rams Braun turntable, one a picture of the roof of Casa Malaparte, both fairly esoteric apparitions, but like Sugimoto’s images, a flash card of one’s own design fluency. 

I’m still working on my backgrounds, real not virtual. It’s a bit like the photographer’s choice to crop the photo in the viewfinder, not post-exposure, as a declaration of one’s aesthetic ethics. The ‘real’ zoom background is about honesty; using only physical backgrounds establishes one bona fides for interior design, videography and social status. If one can afford a well composed background does it put you in the same unenviable class as tone-deaf celebs and their yacht-shots? Is any intentionality inherently a self-conscious (or unconscious) statement of social status? Or is the seemingly undesigned background simply Normcore for the home interior? 
These are, sadly, the questions of the moment.

I started with an intentionally blank background, the actual painted wood wall just a few feet behind my desk chair in the shallow office space I created out of what would have been a hallway. The camera doesn’t see the lovely framed view of fields and ponds I am looking at, and floats my softly illuminated head against a crisply striped, subtly toned background of vertical lines between equal sized boards. It was, compared to the more freestyle folks on the same call, terrible. It was so closed, almost hermetically so, and so controlled that it looked contrived rather than, well, honest. 

Our next attempt was a living room view, side lit and with lots of furniture, posters, stairs and the occasional dog, in the deeper perspective background. In architecture there is a well-argued dichotomy of deep space vs. shallow space (not the Star Trek varieties) essentially an argument about vanishing perspectival compositions vs. frontal layered compositions, that parallels the Renaissance vs. Modern paradigm. I went from flat to deep space and it was, admittedly, a step up. 

Next I tried something flat and well composed, but detailed and textured rather than plain and unforgiving. There is a black rectangle of a wall, recently composed, of all the framed artwork from my wife’s studio that hung on the walls until we added miles of bookshelves to repatriate our library. The ‘tell’ was not just the precisely composed frames, but the lack of any tapering in the rectangles; they were all 90˚ and square to the picture frame of the computer camera’s view. This was as much as accident of laptop placement and luck as it was my distaste for that kind of amateurish photos of buildings that converge toward the sky. 

The way to eliminate the perspective distortion, without magically floating up to the midpoint of the shot, is either in post (with Photoshop, etc.) or by using a perspective correcting lens or view camera (the kind with the bellows and black velvet cloth the photographer disappears underneath to view and focus the shot). Both ‘honest’ methods require expensive equipment and specialized skills, and are the mark of serious practitioners. 

I hoped the ‘wall-o-art’ would be more background-y than foreground-y, but as soon as the zoom started it was immediately remarked upon with an ‘of course you have a striking background’. I failed the ‘unpremeditated’ test with an ‘overcurated’ background. 
The call was actually on Microsoft Teams, which has an interesting option that puts the background out of focus to neutralize it. Except for looking like you are in a scifi movie emerging from the time portal or galactic fog it works. I almost wish it was the opposite; let me go out of focus in favor of the background! There’s even a Photobooth filter (Cloaking Device) that turns you into a transparent-wiggly-gel-appartion a bit like The Invisible Man. 

When I was in college and really didn’t wear glasses (well, I wore them sometimes but really just to look more like John Lennon than for any ophthalmic issue) a friend who needed his glasses occasionally removed them just to relax. He pitied the fools who couldn’t downgrade their vision (without drugs) and stand down a bit. Reversing the Teams blur would allow us all to just relax a bit on these interminable calls.

Next I tried the ‘wall-o-books’ approach with our newly repatriated library. It provoked, of course, the question “have you read all those books?” to which I tried to respond with Anatole France’s answer “Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sevres china every day?”. It just made me look stupid, or pretentious, or stupidly pretentious (so many choices, so little discernment). But the real answer is “they are mostly art, design and architecture books that are not so much filled with words as images, and I have looked through every single one, sometimes dozens of times, even if I haven’t read every single word.” Translation: “I may be stupid, but at least I’m not pretentious”. 

The ‘books as background’ (which Nicholson Baker was intent on inverting) is familiar not just because every guest on every talk show has at least a partial bookcase in the background, usually propped with decorator-approved miscellany, as their intellectual bona fides. Tina Fey had a shelf of friends’ books, clearly legible on screen. Seth Meyers has been propagating a running joke about a copy of “The Thorn Birds” in his background that is constantly transforming into a stack of versions of the book, fake sequels (“Thorn Birds 2; More Birds”) and now books that are anagrams of the title that appear and disappear mostly without comment, like the opening credits to Fawlty Towers (aka Watery Fowls). 

The foreground/background issue is emblematic of the architectures place in culture, or perhaps the place of architects themselves. Architects are not content with designing backgrounds for life, which of course is exactly what we do, but have consistently pressed to put architecture in the foreground. Especially one’s own architecture. 

But life has resisted this focus; It’s not the restaurant space, it’s the food and service; it’s not the museum gallery, it’s the art they display; it’s not the school room, it’s the education; it’s not the living room, it’s the family activity. We live in the 4th dimension (time) while architects are limited to an anemic 3. And it may explain why architects (present author excepted) feel superior to graphic designer who have only 2 measly dimensions to ply their trade! SAD.

Architects have been struggling for the foreground with our wildly sculptural buildings (after all, sculpture is foreground) and aggressive interiors. And it’s no accident that most architectural photography lacks humans, except occasionally as decoration. And certainly no accident that architects have lent (some might say embossed) their own brands onto their projects in a very foreground way.

We designed the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee at the same time that Calatrava built the extension to the Milwaukee Museum of Art (designed by Eero Saarinen, ironically the proto-Calatrava) and quickly the MMA extension, despite its incredible cost overruns and other contentious issues, became ‘The Calatrava’ as in “Let’s meet at the Calatrava”. When I noted (and it might have been in print) that I didn’t expect people to be talking about “going to the Biber” when planning a visit to the H-D Museum, my client thought I was miffed about being ignored. Quite the opposite; I would be horrified if my client’s legendary brand didn’t get top billing. It may make marketing sense to call Frank Gehry’s NYC tower “New York by Gehry” but it does belie the architect’s long game; to be the defining brand or even a verb. We are already part of the way there with the Cool Haus ice cream brand, created by two women leaving architecture and real estate during the last recession (btw, thanks for that!).
And the verbs “Maybe you could Gehry that up a bit” or “Let’s Koolhaus the fuck out of this haus” are not far off.

The struggle of foreground and background is as old as the monarchical (and maniacal) desire to have architecture that reflects the true and exalted grandeur of its patrons. It’s not unlike the 1980’s architectural obsession with semiotics. i.e. signs vs. symbols; it should be enough that buildings act as signs, but symbols are ostensibly imbued with deeper, more meaningful communicative possibilities. While a monarch may not want a building to outshine its eponym, architects are dearly hoping that they can, and that the light reflected from their creation will bathe them in an otherworldly glow. A bit flowery? Maybe, but it seems about right in a world where ‘Architecture’ is more like ‘architecture’, most buildings are not designed by architects, and the size of architects egos has not diminished at the same rate as their (our) control and prestige in the world of built form.

The struggle to regain the ‘mother of all arts’ position has been an ongoing, mostly modern, one. It helps explain the arcane language adopted by architects, and the need to create an intellectual aura around one’s work. It helps explain the Bauhaus concentric diagram of the arts with architecture at the center. It helps explain the endless and timeless fascination with DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man, with the perfection of man dominating the universals of math and geometry. And it might help explain why, every time I zoom, I find myself staring at the background in every Brady Bunch square.

It's like the Mort Sahl quip, tossed off during a 60's performance at some groovy Bleecker Street haunt; standing on the stage, to set the parameters of the evening, he noted that the audience's left was his right, and that pretty much summed up his world view.

*Well beyond FOMO, there is a well-developed set of words and slang about jealously, envy and schadenfreude:
H8ters
Jenvy (portmanteau for Jealousy and Envy)
Drenvy (envy of someone drunker than you)
Green Monster (also GEM for green eyed monster)
Baracknophobia (jealousy of successful Black men in powerful positions)
Bitch Assness
Jellin’
Stenvy (jealousy at person’s status message)
Stack Envy (Las Vegas, chip stack height envy)
Don’t Hate Me Cause You Ain’t Me (used to great effect by AOC)
And literally hundreds of other, highly specific slang about jealousy.