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.

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[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.