On My Mind VII
Photographing
Literal description, or
the illusion of literal description, is what the tools and materials of still
photography do better than any other graphic medium. A still photograph is the
illusion of a literal description of how a camera saw a piece of time and
space. … photographing [is] a two-way
act of respect. Respect for the medium, by letting it do what it does best,
describe. And respect for the subject by describing it as it is. (Garry
Winogrand[i])
Get closer, keep moving! The
New York Times’ Bill Cunningham’s philosophy, adapted for MK: I am not a photographer, I am a scholar who
writes with pictures (and some words). Cunningham lets the streets talk to
him. He goes out for several days and
sees the story emerge. Walker Evans: “you want [your work] to commence from
life, and that’s in the street now.”[ii]
Here was a whole world finely documented down to the last
pocketbook and pocket square. No amount of interviewing could extract such
specificity, the odd tiny details that no one would ever be able to summon from
memory: My grandmother’s patent-leather purse dangling incongruously from the
arm of her Bedouin escort as he guided her on a donkey ride through the desert.
The newspaper crisply folded and tucked under my great-uncle Árpád’s arm as he
strolled down the esplanade. No writing could compete with the minute
particularities of these photographs--and no rewriting would change the reality
they documented. Here, “fixed” in these images by chemical bath, was the
granular historical record, an archival repository that could not be altered
nor avoided. . . .
The
viewer’s knowledge of what is come to (the Holocaust, in this case) liberates
the photograph from its calculating origins. Here is a record of what could not
be known, and so could not be faked. If the picture was meant to obscure what
lay just outside the frame at the moment it was shot, what lay outside the
frame in the future restores its genuineness, ushers it back into history. With
the passage of years, the image gains in mystery, its certainty replaced by
question and doubt, and yet, thereby, gains in authority.[iii]
My photographing is a model of doing the work I
need to do. As for photographing, some phrases one author uses to characterize
Walker Evans’ work strike me as apt: “describe reality but that is an
interpretation,” “to render things visible,” and “deep respect for the visible
world and its phenomena.”[iv]
I
do not have the eye of a photographer, and it is my genuine regret. I see, and
I see terrific stuff, but the photographer sees the print, while I see what is
there. Still, the photographing, and the suites of images montaged, make my
speculative concerns real and justified. And it is the going out and doing that
photographing that works for me.
Again,
when I make photographs I am not seeing a print or the composition. I am seeing
what is in front of me, the lens usually of wider angle: to encompass it all
and it makes me get closer. (I feel overly restrictive using a long lens, too
selectively picking out what is there.[v]) I don’t really see, and
while I have some photographers in mind—Lee Friedlander, Walker Evans—their
work giving me permission to do what I am doing, I am sure I have not learned
enough from them. Besides composition and subject matter, I am insufficiently
sensitive to tone and color palette. Ideally, there is enough light and
sensitivity so I can stop down and get everything in focus. And if I am
photographing someone at work, ideally my shutter speed is high enough so their
moving fingers are not a blur. I am not into bokeh (the peculiar shapes of out-of-focus highlights) or
out-of-focus fore- or background.
I
am documenting, not producing an iconic photograph. My work might well be
better if I had artistic skills. What makes me work is discovering new
phenomena, or multiple instances of a phenomenon. I am driven by more—more examples, more places, more to
complete a set or a sample.
Most
of the photography advice you get is unhelpful to me since my agenda is neither
art nor perfection. I have to have a keen sense of what I am up to so as to
maintain my morale and my sense that what I am doing is worthwhile. Having a
high quality camera and lens helps, even though their high quality might not be
apparent in the photographs.
I
am not refined, expert, or engaged at the high end. Again, it is wasted on me.
But knowing I have a fine tool in my hand make me a better worker, or at least
more careful and aware. I feel good.
I
feel authentic making photographs under the banner of doing my work, my
discovering. I am not at all a photographer, but I try to use that tradition to
motivate and justify what I am doing. If one of my photographs, as an
individual iconic image, participates in the tradition of photography, that is
a big plus, a gift. If the photograph documents, and displays and describes
what there is—just—that is enough for me.
I
like to go out and photograph, especially if I am on a topical mission, so that
I come home with a catch.
Right now, perhaps one or two percent of my
photographs stand on their own. Most are part of suites or tomograms, or are
just there. I would need to be more deliberate and intentional to change that
fraction. I am unlikely to compose as you are supposed to, or at least as I see
photographers composing.
[i]. G. Winogrand, in a 1974 talk at MIT.
[ii]. Taken from the obituary for Bill Cunningham, New York Times, 25, 26 June 2016.
[iii]. Susan Faludi, “In My World,
Photographs Lie,” New York Times
online, Lens, May 16, 2017.
[iv]. H. Liesbrock, “The Historiography and Poetry of Walker Evans,” in Walker Evans: Depth of Field, ed. J. T.
Hill and H. Liesbrock (Munich: Prestel, 2015), pp. 23, 24. Evans was much
influenced by Flaubert (on describing) and by Baudelaire (on walking and
looking).
[v]. In my recent work on everyday dress in public, I have employed a
long focus lens, 90mm on a 35mm camera. While I am out in the open I do not
wish to get too close to those people walking by. It proves difficult to keep
the focus sharp since the subjects are moving, but if I home-in on one point
and let subjects enter my viewfinder, I can do much better. In any case, I am
not doing what is called documentary photography.
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