4 posts tagged “photography”

I’ve always loved the many aspects of photography but I am especially interested in its relation to memory.

A photograph remains as is.
Or, does it?

We do know now that memories degrade, that when we remember something repeatedly, the most recent memory is actually a memory of the second most recent memory, not a memory of the actual source event. It’s like a Xerox of a Xerox. 

Self-portrait in a bathroom mirror

I remember a day I spent at Swansea beach with Cynthia Hudson in January 1964.  There were these large, sculptural rows of bleached driftwood and I took many photographs of Cynthia on the beach with and without the driftwood, with her camera. My memory of that day is the memory of those black and white photographs.  I was 22 years old. On that day the year 1984 was not only the name of Orwell’s vision but a year in the unimaginable future, just to give you an idea of how long ago it was. I left the Cynthia photographs in a trunk in London when I first came to DC in April 1973. They are long gone. In February 1999 there was a fire at my apartment at The Albemarle on Connecticut Avenue in which I lost most of the photographs I owned. They were close to where the fire started near my desk in my study-bedroom and they were destroyed or lost along with much of 30 years worth of work, in hard copies and on two computers, and a lot else besides. Fortunately, there was a bunch of framed photographs in the kitchen and in the living room, which survived. Some of my favorite photographs had been on the wall around my desk, including my all-time favorite photograph of myself -- they were all lost.

A violinist named Martha Edwards took that on the island of Paros in 1971 -- it showed me sitting with a ten-year-old girl named Jennifer Packer, the daughter of my friend Toni Packer. There was a whole world of memory in that photograph and now it is gone forever. I still have the memory of the photograph and it’s much stronger than my memory of the day it was taken. I was crazy about Toni and there was something special in the bond between Jennifer and me. Everyone knew it and everyone commented on how satisfied we both looked sitting on a whitewashed stone bench under the Aegean sun in that photograph..  “Everyone” being the community of (mainly American) artists and writers connected to the Aegean School of Fine Arts. When I looked at that photograph on the wall behind my desk at the Albemarle, I could imagine the massive night sky over Paros so crowded with stars, so close it seemed, it seemed you could touch them. There was a tremendous sense of peace under that sky. And I could remember my connection with Toni and Jennifer as my life among those galaxies and constellations, in that peace, not as a fantasy of domestic (or sexual) life, but as something that transcended all of that,

I believe that a photograph is an “object” made of light. But a photograph has the potential to “document” much more than the physical world; photographs have that potential for mystery and for magic.  

There’s a scene in a wonderful film called Queen Christina in which Greta Garbo is in a bedroom at an inn with her lover John Gilbert. She rushes around the room, touching everything, in attempt to memorize the room and its emotional, sexual, and spiritual contents via sensory perception, I feel like a modest version of Greta when I go about with my camera.

I've always loved taking pictures, I've always loved photography. I love light. I love the tangible world. I love the relationship of photography to memory. I bought my Cannon Power Shot SD750 because I had always wanted to own a camera. Also, I thought that it would be a pleasure and fun to share taking photographs with Sandra, a wonderful photographer who had not yet crossed the digital threshold. I wanted to cross it with her. I am totally sympathetic to old school photography and the dilemmas caused by the phenomenon of digital photography, but I also appreciate the immediacy of digital photography, especially in relation to the internet.

And it has been so fun. I found myself using Facebook photo albums as a kind of journal. For someone with an intense and elaborate internal life, it’s a joy to focus so much on the external world. I find myself uninhibited by the fear of taking bad pictures, or being cheesy or arty or whatever. My approach is completely naive, although I think that I do have a pretty good eye. Speaking of skills, here's an anecdote.

While I served as interim dean at the Corcoran (1987-1988), I relieved the concentration of administrative work by taking a photography course with my friend and colleague Paul Kennedy, a superb teacher. Another friend and colleague, Bob Epstein was kind enough to loan me one of his cameras for the duration. It didn't go smoothly, not entirely. Paul told me that I had not only made just about every mistake imaginable (such as opening a box of paper in a lighted room), but I’d come up with a few no one else had ever even though of. What’s more, the course was titled Beginning Photography, but I was the only beginner in the class. Everyone else was there (mostly) for darkroom access and (also) to get guidance from Paul. So, whenever I asked dumbass beginner questions, the rest of the class got really pissed. I was wasting their time. My critiques were savage. I made some fairly appealing prints, I thought. They did not agree. One guy virtually foamed at the mouth because of the way I’d used a telephoto lens. He told me I was cheating. I was saved by administrative predicaments requiring my attention and and I quit the course with a couple weeks left.  

So, after having a wonderful time with my Power Shot, I began to think about how I could improve my photographic acumen, Take a course? I didn’t think so. Corrective eye surgery? Nah, And so on. And then I got it: I should buy a better camera, which was how I came to own my Leica C-Lux 3.

And so my journal continues, and I’ve discovered that the process has seriously affected the way I see. I now see pictures, just the same way language I hear (or read) leads to poems, and the way stories I used to catch or imagine lead to fiction. I’m grateful to the digital era for making everything so much easier (the dark room was the worst aspect of my brilliant photography career in the late 1980s). And I’m very happy with my journal. You just don't know.

Wolfgang Tillmans

Tillmans

Wolfgang Tillmans achieves two things with this exhibition.  He subverts the hierarchical value system of (fine art) photography; and he subverts the standard functions of museum exhibition and museum exhibition viewing.  On July 6, Smithsonian curator Merry Foresta gave a precise, informative and provocative talk about this show, the fulcrum of which was an argument about the concept of the archive, and how this was relevant to the exhibition.  My simplification of this would be that the contents of a photography archive depend on the input of a viewer for meaning and for cultural significance to be established.  This is somewhat like the idea of negotiation in literary reception theory, formulated by Hans-Robert Jauss, in which the meaning of a text is  determined according to the individual’s set of life experiences and cultural background. This theory was to some degree an amplification of Hans-Georg Gadamer idea of a “fusion of horizons” in which the reader takes measure of the text’s history by reconciling it with their own history.  What reception theory achieved was the displacement of a concern with the author’s intention by a concern with the activity between reader and text as a way of establishing meaning.  What Merry Foresta achieved in her talk was recognition of the photographer’s intention being based on these ideas, directly or not.  The archive, i.e.,  the entire exhibition, or, archives (each of the ten separate galleries housing the exhibition on the second floor of the Hirshhorn), form a kind of neutralization of both standard museum function (instruction, authentication), and the viewer’s practice (relatively passive reception).   Thus, the fusion of horizons is activated.  The beauty of Foresta’s talk was that it jump-started the processes of appreciation in a very particular manner.

My immediate responses to the show, before hearing Foresta’s talk, were all about how anti-museum the show was, and, in some ways, anti-photography.  The latter, insofar as it clearly challenged the hegemony of aesthetic purity in photography; the former, insofar as it ignored the standards of exhibition.  It was a thrilling thing to see.  Most of the photographs were unframed and taped to the wall.  Many of them were snapshots (size and style).  Many of them were the size of postcards.  Some were massive blowups.  Placement was erratic, and some were too high on the wall to be seen clearly.  One room was full of tables with photographs and texts concerning war, poverty, AIDS, homophobia and other social issues.  This room was called the “Truth Study Center” – and its impact managed to be both ironic and passionate at the same time.  Another room was full of blank photographic paper (or, photographs of blank photographic paper), including a huge grid of dark blue and black vertical rectangles, called “Memorial for the Victims of Organized Religions".  

After hearing Merry Foresta’s talk, it was much easier to appreciate what kind of “fusion of horizons” was possible in viewing the Tillmans exhibition.  Most especially, it was feasible to consider the limits of one’s own cultural background as they were being challenged by Tillmans.  Also, it was possible in my case to see how some of my own biases were being validated.  It seemed to me that the Tillmans show was the first I’d seen that clearly belonged to the age of the Internet, an age in which all information was made equal, in some respects, almost in the manner described by a famous American motto, “God made men and women, Samuel Colt made them equal.”  In terms of photography, this made me think about John Berger distinction regarding the uses of photography
(in About Looking), “…photographs which belong to private experience and those which are used publicly."  I wonder what Berger thinks about Flickr and other online photo sharing.  Anyhow, issues concerning public and private, high art and mass art and not-art all came to mind.  The dominance of a high art mentality in fine art photography came to mind.  But, yo, we were in the archive now.  No high art, no mass art, no not-art.  Not yet.  My own bias was not anti-high art, but anti-high art exclusivity, anti-high art contempt for mass art.  This has been complicated in recent times by one’s having been beaten over the head by POPULAR CULTURE, with the fetishization of everything from film noir to Britney’s knickers.  Which brings us to Kant.

In a comment on a recent post at Mark Wallace’s Thinking Again, David Michael Wolach said, ”There is a Kantian argument here, that is: poems needn’t justify being—they are ends not means.”  The question arising in the archive is, if the photographs are the ends, how is that end arrived at? And, how many ends does it consist of?  I am a populist by nature and inclination, and the bias that was validated in the archive for me was one that was against the prescribed limitations to what might be experienced looking at photographs.  In a subtle way, Merry Foresta’s real impact was to give us viewers permission to think, to really think for ourselves.  Not a popular activity, like driving, or eating.  No, an unpopular activity, like listening.   

OK, much of this is not really that new, maybe.  I’m no expert on photography, by any means.  I’ve looked a lot and I’ve read some.  And I am intensely attached to the work of some photographers, such as Andre Kertesz, Sylvia Plachy, Steve Szabo, Francesca Woodman, Sandra Rottmann and Marcus Haydock.  But I am vastly ignorant concerning the critical history of photography and the contemporary issues involved.  And I don’t know that much about Gadamer and Jauss, either.  I’ve owned books by both of them, but I’ve never read them, at least not thoroughly – just enough to get some ideas, which I may well have misunderstood.  As a matter of fact, I don’t want to be an expert on anything.  I’ve worked in academia for almost four decades, in Wales, in Greece, and here, and I have no interest in becoming an academic.  Academia is about territory, and that’s just not my bag, man, you dig?  It’s not that I don’t love academia, I do, truly. All those scholars, sussing stuff out and all.  Que wow.  Their work is an endless source of pleasure and enlightenment.  And I don’t mean to apologize for my dumb ass, either, you dig.

Marcus Haydock Photographs at Fotonet

“Seeing implies distance.” 
Maurice Blanchot

Art may change the nature of that distance, as does the work of the young British photographer Marcus Haydock.  See this sequence at Fotonet: 

http://www.fotonet-south.org.uk/haydock/index.html

The immediacy of these combined images confronts the viewer in two significant ways.  First, with combinations of images which defy comfortable explanation, or even the more complex kind of explanation that reigns in academia.  Second, any viewer with serious interest is going to be obliged to consider their own expectations and to recognize what (meaning) they are inclined to project, as well as where they have learned to project it.
I believe that the source of the power of this sequence is in the largely non-literal quality
of the juxtapositions.  Their impact is in emotional value rather than in literal or symbolic connection, even though there are plenty of connections to be made.  Any attempt to explain the impact of this work will automatically revert to the distance which Haydock has reduced via the apparent passion of his vision, which is informed by social and political anger (and a good deal of lurking disgust). 

There is a level of severity in these pictures, which transcends their potential categories, such as “portrait” and “landscape” and so on.  It has been said many times that the world of images in which we live has made Surrealism redundant.  Just as Man Ray claimed that Dada could not function in New York City in the early days of the 20th Century because New York City was Dada, so may we now claim that the world is Surrealism.  We have become accustomed to pictures of starving babies juxtaposed with advertisements for Virginia Slims cigarettes.  What we have lost is the shock of Surrealism.  Haydock’s photographs are shocking in the best way, not as the product of an intention to shock, but of an unflinching vision that does not let the viewer off the hook. 

Ultimately, our humanity is about connection.  The impulse in these works compels the viewer to unfamiliarity, to an index of emotional complexity involving fear, compassion, horror, desire, damage, disgust, wonder, pleasure, humor, serenity and more (unnamable) responses, including an aesthetic gratification that does not dilute its impact.  The connections are indicated, rather than dictated.  I am grateful for this change in distance, for these connections, for the authenticity of this work.

June 30 2007