Filed under: Really?

I feel like we have gone back to the time of Matthew Brady, not in the least because men seem to dress like they are late for a nearby civil war battlefield, short stovepipe pants, felt coat and millitary cadet hat covering unwashed hair mingling with steamboat captain beard and mustache, a fleck of loose pipe tobacco at the corner of the mouth, but I digress. Considering the snapshot above, I should not offer opinions on fashion.

The decisive moment is now a good half minute. I believe it would be sufficient for Brady and his eight-ten on a sunny day.

…people are waiting everywhere…I see them. Like in that movie, I see dead people.

Bidden by the outstretched Franken-Camera they are immovable, locked in a death mask, waiting, waiting. If it was a subway they would not be so patient. I think the idea is, if I can just out-wait this camera, it will do what I want it to do. It will make that perfect picture of Me.

I watched a woman use her cell phone to make a self portrait on the B37 bus recently. Obviously the light was good or she was bored, her boyfriend was not proving to be an arresting subject. It was a curious case of mirror-mirror on the wall, except for the maddening fact that the mirror was turned the other way. With each picture she had to turn the phone around to see if she got what she wanted. I desperately wanted to intervene-hey this is my job didn’t you know?- I could see the image on the LCD that she was about to make. Higher, left, ok, don’t tilt the head, less smile. This will be the FB status update for when you dump this brohunk and move on…. I really don’t understand why some enterprising cell phone manufacturer has not simply made a camera exactly like a make-up compact, they are already small, shiny and colourful. Bury the lens in the mirror!  Then you could see yourself as you made the picture. Fait accompli.

The camera has now become an accomplice in our efforts to attain stardom and we are the lead character of our own lives! Born of two worlds and with a compelling personal narrative! We deserve a picture that confirms this. Head tilt, fish lips, squint. There. We need to control the media, even our own. Balloon Boy. Creepy White House Party Crashers.  I really don’t know why we worry so much about media censorship, when we edit our own stories much more heavily. Gone are all the random moments. Delete that. And definitely delete that off your friends phone or facebook page. Please do not tag me in someone else’s photograph. That is not an “official” photograph of Me™.

I miss the snapshot. I realize that what I am calling the snapshot and “snapshots” are very different things. Winogrand liked to point out when asked about his “snapshot aesthetic” that the garden variety snapshot was not very haphazard or uncontrolled, what his frames seemed to be suggesting, but actually a very staged and formalized genre of picture making, a subject in front of some object, owned or mastered by the person depicted. Like the photograph above. What I mean by snapshots refers to the vernacular use of snapshots and the lack of control and  innocence that film allowed. When you can’t see what you are doing instantly, you can’t be that self conscious. Or styled or controlling. The snapshot was a memento, like found beach glass, and it is made with the speed of our reaction to life, instantaneously. And permanent. I think this is why digital compact cameras have never really done it for me, they can’t focus and shoot fast enough to matter in this way.

If a camera cannot keep up to wit, can it say anything meaningful? And if you could take back what you say, as if it never happened, what does that do to our sense of selves?

A Camera, a Real Camera, is a subversive object. Robert Frank (I think) described carrying the Leica felt like having a gun in your pocket. Photographs threaten politics and vanity equally. I find this surprising since everyone has cameras and everyone takes pictures. Surely if everyone is doing it it means nothing? Yet still. I brought this contradiction up at a recent shoot and the sitter reminded me of the camera phone video of Neda’s Agha-Soltan’s death, the female Iranian protester, and how that video has gone on to be a symbol of the Iranian Resistance. The Youtube Revolution as it is called. Another Nick Ut moment. I am not so sure about this, I am not sure that the world can be galvanized for very long by such imagery, still or motion. Both moving. But are we moved? I am not old enough to know if the same questions were asked of the photographs produced during the Vietnam War, yet we tend to acknowledge that the images coming back from that War did much to change the course of our involvement there.

Photography is subversive, but it is subversive everywhere, which means nowhere. It is no longer the tool of one government, on ideology, but of all governments, and all people really. And I think this means that we assume all photographs are staged fakes since we are busy now staging our own lives for social media. The snapshot is dead, and we are all waiting for face detection to locate our true selves.

Do not bore me with your protestations. I have heard them all before. Yes I know Karl Lagerfeld photographed you recently and better, barely containing his joy behind those dark sunglasses and tight white collar. Ryan McGinley similarly found the pale of your flesh fetching as you tumbled out of your jeans in the soft desert night aglow with sparklers, a bitten peach spilling juice down your pimply chin.

And you D_____ , never do candids I understand, who would want to see your ample jowels mid-sentence frag-one eye drifting off to points unrelated to the other-

I agree wholeheartedly H____, posing for pictures is emphatically not art- i really don’t know what all those other artists might have been thinking, wasting their time like that when all along YOU had the answer-OH!-YOU are not comfortable, we must do whatever we can to make YOU comfortable, sedate even, we could go for tranquillized, I mean, tranquil- don’t worry, all that preparartion and equipment I brought with the intention of doing my very best, that will go unused in my back pocket, we will go with your best idea, I am sure after seeing yourself so, so many times and from so many angles, never from below of course, (you know who you are) that you really have exhausted all possibilities, thoroughly, and have calculated the best pictures come at an angle of 36 degrees with the north light in a month that contains an “r”.

And you are not interesting enough- we all see that now, something you suffered your whole life I expect, nobly, and I know you never look good in pictures, not a one, narcissism does do that to a person.

I concur, photography is the most cruel thing one human being can inflict upon another, perhaps second only to the indignities one might suffer in a foreign prison. I promise I will make this brief, your time is money isn’t it, not like my time which is spent like a found penny, and no, I don’t need to take so many just to get one-the true artist needs but one master stroke of the pen or brush, one fragile sheet of film, one hand coated glass plate sweated over mercury fumes by hand, with which to capture all that is so very

human,
famous,
noble,
beautiful,
glamourous,
witty,
urbane,
rebellious,
grisled or gamine about YOU.

Because this portrait is nothing if not about YOU, there is no one else in the room is there? That Mona Lisa really tells us a lot about Mona doesn’t it? I really don’t know why she agreed to that picture, definitely was dealing with some weight issues and depression, could this poor chap not come back at a more opportune moment, perhaps when I’d had a little more sun, these northern Italian winters are brutal on a woman’s skin after all.

I guess it is the paycheque, these Photographers all make a lot of money don’t they, another face in the rogues gallery, another payday, dining out as Jennifer Aniston likes to say, on my fair countenance.

Dear recalcitrant portrait subject, please indulge me.

Your humble servant,

Robert.

Around mile 6.

Everyone is away, nothing is doing, we are into August. The gallery openings and free booze are a couple months away, the blogosphere is awaiting the next Edgar Martins to grace the stage, and I have just completed week three of training for the NYC marathon.

Week four is a rest week, the idea is that your muscles get a chance to recover a little from the steady overload they have been experiencing the last three weeks, which culminated in a 16 mile run Saturday evening. See above.

In photography it feels like progressive overload all the time. The steady drum beat of what to do next, how to keep the little ship from sinking. But in August, you really can’t do that, no one is around to hear the sound of your one shutter clapping.

For a while I have been tempted to write in bold caps “PHOTOGRAPHY IS DEAD” as the headline to a post. Catch me in a bad mood and I still might. Still photography for me was the defining art form of the Twentieth Century. Do I need a degree to say that? You might even say that the moon landing July 1969 was the culmination of all that still photography could do, to relate the actual imprint (via another actual imprint) of man on a landscape. Somewhere in a vault at NASA, exists the actual frame that was exposed to the 1/500th of a second of sunlight reflected from the boot imprint of Neil Armstrong. He also shot the same patch of lunar soil minus his bootprint, the moment before. It shows a great presence of mind to understand that there is the moon “before” and the moon “after.” And more than film or video, still photography is the exact medium in which to contemplate this. There is the film “before” and the film “after” exposure as well. The silver salts are like the lunar soil. Grains recording our existence. Wow. Pretty existential.

You could also argue, and I will, being that it is August and there is nothing else to argue, that at that moment photography died and the moving image became paramount in the culture. It was already happening, in Vietnam, for example, the shootout as it were between still and motion, I think still imagery won that war, pun intended. But the moon landing as it was shown on TV around the world galvanized the power of the flow of images over the still. A series of stills from an alien planet in real time does not have the same power. I remember when the Mars landers started sending back panoramas for the first time, and while the NASA scientists were besides themselves in the control room, the line by line reveal of the  Martian landscape was pretty ho-hum to me. I have watched a scanner work too long to find what it reveals to be that exciting.

I know I would get a lot of argument over whether stills or film was the defining art form of the Twentieth Century. Motion pictures have shaped our culture enormously. But I feel as a pure art form the still image has evolved the most.

I think we are at the other end of the telescope now, looking back at photography and what it did and meant to us. I say this because almost all of the work I see now is essentially nostalgic, nostalgic of a time or feeling or place or process. Recently Todd Papageorge published “Passing through Eden”, a collection of images from his years wandering Central Park. The work is completely modern in conception, the unrelenting gaze of the camera making what the camera makes, photographs, but the publishing of it is essentially nostalgic. I have read that TP urges his students at Yale to contemplate working in this genre, the lyrical documentarian, camera in hand, and he says he gets no takers. I think that for photography, quote-unquote, this period in the late 60′s early 70′s was the ultimate period, the point at which art photography reached its apogee to borrow a space term. It is hard to get any better than the unblinking, unrelenting, rigourous exactitude of the black and white or colour images of Robert Adams, Arbus, Friedlander, Winogrand, Eggleston, etc.

This power comes from that sense that you are seeing the trace or existence of something real. Like the lunar footprint, or the image of Lincoln in the Smithsonian, you look closely and it feels as if you can touch reality just on the other side of the glass. But this necessarily limits photography to what actually exists. As soon as you admit fabrication, the power ebbs. And for me the last couple decades of photography have been bouncing along in the nostalgic, either borrowing from painting, or borrowing from the history of photography itself. Sort of like current Broadway musical theatre, a recreation of a long gone heyday.

As I said, we started this trek away from photography during that moon landing. The essential difference between a still photograph and a motion film is that one exists and the other doesn’t. You can hold a photograph in your hand, see it, understand it, confirm it’s existence. You can only apprehend a film, it exists only in your brain as the joining of 24 frames per second by persistence of vision. To see the physical film, there is no motion. It exists only in projection. And you can’t even hold one moment, except as a still, a broken fragment of the whole. This makes motion film the idea medium of what might be, of fantasy. Nothing is real, so it needn’t be. You might argue that the power of documentary film suggests that we still value the real in motion film, but I think we equally value being tricked in film, the willing suspension of disbelief, the surprise twist, the Kaiser Sose at the end. It doesn’t bother us in motion to find out it was all made up. But in still photography, it does. You feel let down. Edgar Martin’d.

Photography is dead. Slowly dying since the 70′s, on life support the last decade or so, I think you will see motion film (video) in many of the applications where the still was used formerly. And I believe the internet is the natural home of the video as print was to the still image. Stills on the internet are not as compelling as motion is. Bandwidth is the only obstacle, otherwise we’d be there now. With youtube, we mostly are there.

Of course there are those that point out that Radio didn’t kill live music performance (although how many of us now know how to play an instrument?) that Television didn’t kill Film, or Print Journalism, and that the Internet will not kill Print. But this does not mean that different mediums have not had to adapt to different, altered or reduced roles. What we are seeing now is the decline of the still image and print. I don’t see any way that it will have in the Twenty First Century, the impact that it did in the Twentieth.

But it is August. Ask me again in September.

edit: another take here on fin de siècle. My opinion, Talk was no George.

Some people set goals, some people attain goals, and some people have goals. I’m not sure I’m any one of those three.

That sounds terrible. And maybe I am forgetting or denying goals set in the past. For example a friend and I wanted to cycle down the west coast one summer. We did, more or less. It was not a goal, it was more like an ordeal, something you get yourself into and then have to negotiate to get out of. But you buy a plane ticket and basically you have to get there or not come home.

I don’t know that I ever set a goal of becoming a professional photographer. For starters, I did not know how you did that. All the compass points were in the form of book jackets and introductions, for example the Bill Allard book on his years becoming a National Geographic photographer. I got to thank him for that, by the way, last year, at a loft party at David Alan Harvey’s. He took the genuflecting well, considering. He allowed that that book had had a good response. Perhaps not what you want, it’s about the pictures isn’t it? Well, I like the pictures too. I think I forgot to say that.

I don’t know that I ever celebrated “becoming” a professional photographer. Does that still mean I am “emerging?” I have a copy of Joel Sternfeld’s “American Prospects, 1987, and on the back cover is a quote from Time magazine, it reads “Pictures that were once compelling oddities are now linked into an original meditation on the national life. It clinches the case for Sternfeld as an emerging American master.” (italics mine) I guess you can always be emerging, even when you get to be a master.

I do remember a job in the Bahamas sometime in 1999 or 2000 for W magazine where during a lunch hour break we were all in the pool and I was thinking to myself, “I should be really happy right now. Here I am.” Of course I wasn’t, I was beating myself up over the next picture or the last picture, or the next job or the last job, and feeling not secure about anything.

I don’t know that you get a triumphant moment in photography. THIS, HERE, IS THE ONE PHOTOGRAPH! FINALLY!  the headline reads. I feel like Garrison Keillor, reading the News from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children, above average. I should know, having a Lutheran pastor in the family.

Photography is not something that submits itself easily to goal setting. That said though, I think it is easy to deny yourself a payoff. Think of the piles of prints you have in boxes in neat little rows somewhere in your studio. And some people don’t photograph for others, they just do it for themselves. But I think sometimes they are not being honest with themselves, don’t we all do it for recognition of one form or another?

Which brings me to Marathons. In order to run one you have to train, you have commit to four months of work and more beyond that just to be ready. In January I half decided that I was going to run the Vancouver Marathon coming May 3rd. I put the mileage on the calendar, numbers I had never seen before, and wondered if I could do it?

Well the training is over, nothing that I can do now will make much of a difference two weeks from now. I couldn’t afford the Vancouver travel, but beautiful New Jersey has a popular seaside marathon in Long Branch. It is not the perfect first marathon. But the perfect is the enemy of the good. What is the point of doing all the training, all four hundred miles, without some painful payoff?

I know some people live by goals, by to do lists, by achievements. When you look at it backwards though, it makes more sense to me. The fact that you can put something on the calendar four months away and break it down to the quotidian, as a way of getting it done. It might apply to photography too.

“The easy Internet ad dollars of the late 1990s enticed newspapers and magazines to put all of their content, plus a whole lot of blogs and whistles, onto their websites for free. But the bulk of the ad dollars has ended up flowing to groups that did not actually create much content but instead piggybacked on it: search engines, portals and some aggregators.

…

But things have changed. “With newspapers entering bankruptcy even as their audience grows, the threat is not just to the companies that own them, but also to the news itself,” wrote the savvy New York Times columnist David Carr last month in a column endorsing the idea of paid content. This creates a necessity that ought to be the mother of invention. In addition, our two most creative digital innovators have shown that a pay-per-drink model can work when it’s made easy enough: Steve Jobs got music consumers (of all people) comfortable with the concept of paying 99 cents for a tune instead of Napsterizing an entire industry, and Jeff Bezos with his Kindle showed that consumers would buy electronic versions of books, magazines and newspapers if purchases could be done simply.”

Walter Isascson, Time Magazine

Lincoln, Darwin, and the Penny

February is the cruelest month. It is also the month of my birthday, and other brilliant people like me, Lincoln and Darwin to name two. I’m sure there are plenty of other stupid people too. 

Recently Walter Isaacson, now there is a segue, wrote a piece in Time magazine about saving newspapers. Good thing he wrote it too, Time magazine was all of 56 pages, I guess getting a ringer in can keep the team in the game.

He traces the development of media online, from the early days as magazines and newspapers tried to figure out how this was going to work. All of them ran up against what I have called the TV mentality, or the idea that what is on the screen should be free, or monetized by advertising.  I think there has been a confusion between the ideals of the internet, that information should flow freely and be universally accessible, and how it has turned out, the conflation of the TV mentality with the idealism of the internet. We are stuck at the point where now the information itself is free, because the TV model of advertising supported content has failed online. You can thank Google for that failure as Isaacson observes, by making ads ubiquitous and essentially meaningless the value of those ads is driven down, as is the available pool of advertising dollars.

Notice the distinction I am making, the internet is not, I believe, about making ideas “free” from an intellectual property standpoint. It is about making access universal. The internet was invented by scientists for communication. The ideas that were being shared were paid for by colleges and universities in grants and endowments. What appears to be a Star Trek universe without money and everyone doing what they are supposed to be doing for “The Enterprise” is nothing but. (see what I did there?) The only way that research gets done is that people who are free to work where they want to work are paid in money which is the tool that makes it possible. Even pure research eventually gets monetized, thank goodness for my space pen that writes upside down!

So we have a confusing set of behaviours. We want to encourage freedom of access to information, as in a library. We are going in with the freedom of browsing as associated with the television. The internet is like a Library turned into television. There was never more confusion in school than when the Library was involved. No one understood the arcane language of attribution and citation, the latin shortforms cf, ibid, etc, and the fact that you couldn’t just copy whole cloth out of the encyclopedia for your term report. But you could go borrow a book for free. So you can see there the tension between the Star Trek world of pure ideas and altruistic behaviour and the capitalist world of citation and plagiarism. Just how are we supposed to behave?

The internet takes intention and makes attention-a shopping mall takes attention and makes intention-

You can browse a library, a mall, and the internet. But they are not the same.

The mall and the internet are strikingly similar, both are highly organized around the pleasure of looking, and not being looked at, at least that we are aware of. The mall takes the concept of the market square, the commons, and tweaks it ever so slightly from a public place of exchange for ideas, politics, art, and commerce, into a private space of commerce only. It is not the site of political discourse or free speech. The browsing function is enhanced so that the citizen becomes dissociated from the citizenry so to speak, they become passive buyers. The mall stimulates (or overwhelms, in the case of children’s breakfast cereals) your senses, feeds you, controls the climate, and allows you to sample (touch, hold, fondle) a variety of goods without feeling obliged to buy; big open doors, wide aisles, open merchandise. Hopefully the seduction entices you to buy. Attention is converted to a buying action. 

 The internet, conversely, is more like TV, it takes intention, the intent to do something, to go somewhere, (Microsoft, Where do you want to go today?) and changes it to simple attention, random browsing. The architecture of links is what does this. Before you know it, you are reading about Yak herding in Bhutan. It is more like the library in this case. Or Strand Books. Go in looking for one thing and come out with something different.

Now you could argue that the internet enables some buying activity, but in the case of music, it was a painful transition. The iPhone App store has been a breakout success. Subscribing to media however, has not taken hold. All we really want is to be held in attention. Don’t ask us for money. We can’t fondle the goods. We can only scroll and click. It is primitive. (Scrolls?) Speaking of fondling, you might locate the success of the App store in the pleasure of the iPhone itself, the Steely Dan of Trojan horses (I can’t believe I actually wrote that) as far as online buying goes. This is something Apple gets right in all of its products, the seduction of form. Apple turns attention into intention in all of it’s products. 

Understand the behaviour, define the Marketplace

So the basic unit of the internet, the click, has a value that we have not yet figured out. It is a new behaviour. It is a kind of decision but it is the forestalling of decision. Channel surfing, web surfing. This is the problem. You can’t create a marketplace if you can’t monetize the behaviour. For now we have adopted the TV model wholly and simply- sell eyeballs and clicks back to advertisers. Apple seems to be on to something because they have transformed the “click” into the “Touch”-meaning they get how browsing is pleasure, and pleasure can be converted into purchasing action. But Apple is the aberration in the marketplace.

And the marketplace has been hijacked by the telcos as Isaacson writes:

“Another group that benefits from free journalism is Internet service providers. They get to charge customers $20 to $30 a month for access to the Web’s trove of free content and services. As a result, it is not in their interest to facilitate easy ways for media creators to charge for their content. Thus we have a world in which phone companies have accustomed kids to paying up to 20 cents when they send a text message but it seems technologically and psychologically impossible to get people to pay 10 cents for a magazine, newspaper or newscast.”

(Aside- Text messaging is the cell company’s dirty little secret. There is no physical reason why text messaging should cost anything. Text messages are routed within communications that the cell phone makes to identify itself to the network. It is part of the overhead, unused bits that pass regardless of the users intervention. That is why they have a maximum length, the size of the space available. There is no incremental increase in network load no matter how many text messages are sent. It is the opposite of actual voice and data traffic. Yet we pay for it. It is like monetizing your breath. There is no doubt that the telco’s are going to have to bear a share of the burden of change.)

Until we redefine our behaviour online, it will be difficult to establish a true marketplace. In that it looks like a traditional marketplace, it has failed. Meaning brand retailers and consumers. The real growth, the new behaviour, has occurred with what has been interestingly defined as “user generated content”, which reinforces the distinction between “us” the consumer, and “them”, the corporation. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc. I should be able to hang out a shingle and sell my content online. But in the absence of a true marketplace, this is difficult. 

“Snark” media has managed to carve a very lucrative toehold in the dying carcass of mainstream-media. You can’t just grab a photograph from the NY Times online or Getty, write a funny comment and post that as “content” somehow hiding behind fair use. NYT paid for the wire photograph, so why should Gawker get to run essentially the same picture under the guise of criticism or commentary when really they are creating an whole other category, David Denby calls it “Snark” or at the very least, a funny diversion. If Jon Stewart does a piece lampooning an issue, you can bet they get clearance and pay for whatever they use. It is unclear what Gawker pays for and what it simply credits back without paying for. This is an example of how the TV mindset of selling eyeballs back to advertisers is failing online. The only way that the Gawker model works is if the content is free. They get to sell the attention back to the advertiser. Profit. One you have to pay for that content then you really are no different from a mainstream source, creating your own unique content with the associated “burden” of paying creators. Less profit. 

In a true marketplace the online behaviour of browsing clicks and links would have value on some level other than as pure attention. As in a real marketplace, eventually you have to buy. It is a measure of how desperately we cling to the infantile pleasure of looking that we are so frustrated by online links that go behind paywalls! Just look at that angry face! Baby wants his toys! Why does mommy take them away! Grrr! Whaaa! Seriously, perhaps this is a function of a normal maturation process-we have been calling it web 1.0, web 2.0, so grownup! Really we have Web-Two-Year-Old. That is where we are. The web as playpen. Part of this is enormously creative, the play aspect. But eventually you teach the kids how to set up a lemonade stand at the end of the driveway. Ok so its not Darwin, but it is an evolution. (I was stretching for a title)

We find ways of paying for things all the time. Call it redistribution of income. Ouch! It comes in the form of tax law that gives breaks to small business, write offs for business purchases like subscriptions, and luxury taxes. There is also a vast pool of money contained in the simple rounding of our purchases to the next dollar. Banks are now starting to toy with working with schemes that capture that. The Lincoln Penny is powerful. Redirecting that money online for clicks is not unimaginable.

It may take the death of printed media to force a normalized online buying behaviour with respect to Newspapers and magazines. Or it might just take a simple tactile device like the iPhone to drive purchases. The Kindle does not seem to be there yet. I think the maturation is in colour, bandwidth, and form factor. And interactivity, although that has been poorly defined up until now. People seem to think that this “problem” is too hard, which I think is to ignore that the problem is simple, but our behaviour is immature. We have been caught up in a bubble of growth that was not sustainable. Time to pay.

The internet may also become partly a utility. We are already heading towards a world of utilities. Consumer banks will probably become like utilities, says Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.” (interview with Charlie Rose). The chaos created by bank failures would be too great to allow the possibility of say, one day, not being able to get cash out of a cash machine.  So we are moving towards a form of bank nationalisation. Add this to the other functions of a modern society that we have come to expect, healthcare (ok now?) law and order, and banking is obviously an essential service. The internet may be another. 

Have I solved all the problems yet? I guess I’m saying there is no problem. Or no problems that a little upheaval can’t solve.

I submitted this under editorial, a story for New York Times on single dads who have elected to have children but not through marriage. Steve Harris conceived Ben with a surrogate mother and donor egg. The playpen in the office allows Ben to visit his dad at the Law office, however I am pretty sure the Nanny is always nearby.

I picked this mainly because it is funny and attention grabbing, it is not however the image that ran. What can you say, it’s a crapshoot…

Under personal unpublished I submitted this excerpt from the series “Flyover States.”

This was the description:

“I would like to go back to a time when a solitary aircraft flying overhead was an object of wonder and beauty instead of suspicion and dread. The aircraft are purposely rendered small and visible only in high magnifications, dissolving into grain,  passing or intersecting a boundary between existence and disappearance from sight.”

I played with the idea of having dyptics where I would actually enlarge the section in question to show how the image dissolves into grain, or in this case, noise. Unfortunately digital images as pixels do not enlarge the way that film images break up into grain. Very quickly you get square pixels. Someone needs to invent a stochastic image sensor.

It is very hard to look at these pictures and not feel something awful might happen. The military has used silhouettes as enemy aircraft identification training since the dawn of flight. Yet the silhouette of a bird carries no such connotation.

Yes I know I don’t have a hope in hell of winning PDN. YMMV.

The jet trails, when divorced of scale become abstract and beautiful. 

For me, the sense of “recovering” the wonder of looking up at a plane in the sky is part of this. We all know what it means now. There is a gross scale “distortion” going on in those photographs of the planes impacting the Twin Towers. Your mind cannot “span” the distance to understand what went on. I think this is part of the fascination those images create, they can be awful and beautiful simultaneously. In this work, however, I would like to recover some of the innocence and wonder of looking up, if that is possible. I have other images that are closer to echos of 9-11, and I think having lived with them for a while, I have no interest in showing them. 

You should also note my last name is Wright, and my dad worked in an aircraft factory his entire career. One of the first photographs I ever printed was in a darkroom he built for us where developed contact prints from his war time negatives, images of Spitfires and Lancasters in the Egyptian desert.

And about me;

The reason I picked up a camera in the first place was to experience the world and understand it. Later I realized I was primarily investigating my relation to the world and making meaning out of it for me. At first I was trying to express intelligence. Lately I can see that I am also trying to express emotion. The process for me is like trying to decipher a language. Characters appear, and them a syntax. What does it mean? The same symbols over and over. A context changes but a symbol remains. A clue. Eventually it is revealed to me what I am doing. Rarely can I start out knowing “what” it is that I am doing. Or if i think I do, it is not what I thought…

I grew up in Canada and came to New York in 1996. I am self taught and have worked professionally as an editorial photographer in the last twelve years. I have a BA from Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada in Film Studies and Literature. Film Criticism and Theory was a large part of that degree, and I continue somewhat in that vein on my blog, robertwrightphoto.com/writing…

Writing these things is very difficult, especially if you have a rambling kind of voice like I do. So I had to economize. I think it is pretty free of art-speak, although I did say “recover.” That’s a little weak.

Photography as Collection

The exquisite corpse: the future of photography, it is not about any one person’s work, it is about the mass. 

How collecting other work saves you from making your own?

These were all titles I considered for this follow-on piece. I am trying to put it in a bigger context. Where are we going in photography? Or where did we think we were going because we misunderstood the past…

By Tim Barber’s own admission, he functions more as a collector than as a curator. The web creates the possibility of bringing together unlimited numbers of photographs and the attraction is to ffffind something in that mass. I think this is where some confusion sets in. I think it is one thing to see collection as a valid strategy for curation (which it is in my opinion) and another thing to see collection as a valid strategy for making work. The trouble that TB gets into is that he conflates the one with the other. See it is perfectly fine to work in the typological mode, which is essentially being a photographic collector of types. The Bechers, Sander, etc. But they are not collecting ANYTHING, they are curating what they collect. Water Towers, Professions. 

To curate a show based on the photography of EVERYTHING, in other words to be a collector of photographs of anything is where you can get into trouble. The defense is that photographs can BE about ANYTHING. Yes, a photograph can be about anything, but it doesn’t necessarily follow it is a good photograph…

It makes me think of The Democratic Forest by William Eggleston. Thousands upon thousands of photographs. When asked what he was working on lately Eggleston responded, “I have been photographing democratically.” There is a lot in that statement.

This the “rationale” about Various Photographs, and the basis of a lot of photography, that it is somehow “democratic” because it is an artform that nearly anyone can do. And further, that this should be a good thing.  I have a friend who is legally blind, who reads text at a distance of about four inches, but who makes the most astonishing photographs I have ever seen. In the sense that photography is universal, you could say that photography is democratic. Anyone can take a picture. The act. Looking at it that way you can say anyone can paint. The act. But we are not so accepting of that, although David Letterman has some great Elephant paintings to show you. So there is the act, and there is the intention. An elephant can make a great painting but he or she cannot intend to make a great painting. At least as far as we can tell…

So what did Eggleston mean when he said he was photographing democratically? My sense of it is that his democracy was of the subjects within the frame. Do not read that as “all subjects are equal.” You can read that as “you can photograph anything.” But it is not about “the subject” it is about everything in the frame. 

His “war with the obvious” was not about showing us the beauty of the ordinary, which is how I believe many people take it, his war was with “obvious” subjects. A single object depicted in space in the center of the frame. Eggleston’s democracy was to see everything and depict with equal weight all objects in his frame. This is why he talks about the reproduction of Bresson’s Decisive Moment, typical of the era in that it was flat,  open, and low contrast, it depicted all elements in the frame equally, whereas when he saw the originals they were standard prints. It was the democracy of the reproduction that made the pictures work. Go back to read the afterward in the book and you will see what I mean.

This is the problem: how do you see THE FOREST for the trees. How do you see it all at once when you are looking at details. I believe the garden variety understanding of Eggleston’s importance is misunderstood, we think of him as a photographer of the mundane details (this is what Eudora Welty says in the introduction) that reveal existential meanings and the presence of life. My understanding of The Democratic Forest is the opposite, the book begins with a photograph of a solitary tree and a dedication to “The memory of my aunt, Minnie Maude Schuyler”, followed by a photograph of a map of the United States and world globe titled “Memphis, at the Travel Agent’s.” You don’t even need to see these pictures to get the implication-this is the war with the obvious, a dedication to a late loved Aunt who would not understand what was to follow save for this lone tree, an fitting photograph of a simple lovely subject dead-center in the frame. But that was not what he wanted to show, The Democratic Forest is the problem of how do you see the FOREST, all of it, the map of the United States and The Globe, and depict it from Memphis Tenn? How can you be simultaneously everywhere and here? How does a picture make itself out of the world?

So I am back to Barber. His show demonstrates what we have done with the legacy of Eggleston’s Democratic Forest. We have been concerned with people up trees. And the mundane, and the ephemeral, but I don’t think we have absorbed, or maybe we have abandoned the lessons of Eggleston which is to make pictures democratically, not “of everything” but of everything equally. In other words, photography is not about “the subject.” It is about the total, the picture, the picture “problem.” It is people AND trees if that is your bag.

Why do I think Various Photographs is problematic? 

It adopts the view that authorship is incidental, that photography can be characterized as collecting, and that you can photograph “anything.” 

It is the reverse: authorship is everything, photography is not collecting and it is not about photographing “anything,” it is about treating everything in the photograph as equal.

How do I know I am right? When you come out of looking at that show, or any similar collection like that you do not want to take pictures. Your reaction (my reaction) is, god, everything has been photographed. You are exhausted. Subject matter has been exhausted. Which is why it is not about the subject. To photograph everything is not to “see” anything. This is the sickness of the collector. It is impossible to collect everything. Collyer syndrome. And collection is only a substitute for understanding. If we could only collect, catalogue, name, describe, everything then we would know and control and understand. To dissect the exquisite corpse.

By the way, one version of an “exquisite corpse” is a drawing divided in three completed by different individuals. Maybe the single line of photographs was never intended…?

I’ll leave it there. My intention is not to tear down but to challenge. I write about what I react to, and what moves me strongly. In terms of the future of photography, whatever that possibly could mean, and Various Photographs, there is something there to consider. I think many people who saw the show saw “the photographs” and to them it looked like what they have come to expect from photography now, at least on the web. That met expectation, at least as I gauged it from the people at the show, the Saturday crowd, the more everyday crowd, not the photo-crowd, that met expectation is very much a barometer of where we are. Perhaps it is the failure of one kind of photography and the success of another. Perhaps photography has become “democratic” by becoming what many people wish, as opposed to photography being democratic by nature.

Those of you who know me personally may be able to guess what is going on…