Good photographs are the result of seeing a good photograph and then photographing it.
So, it’s an easy game play, everybody knows the rules and it’s no wonder everybody does it. However this idea of sight, or the culture that’s built up around it, is something I do have a bit of a problem with and have in the past contradicted myself over. My argument is that contradictions are good, talking yourself right the way around in a circle allows you to look at the idea from all angles and get a better handle on it, I think. My friend Kate Smith called me on this during an informal interview once, and I’m sure I’ve contradicted myself over it since then. What bothers me is this idea that either people are born with sight, that punchy instinct to make a good picture, or they are not. Plain and simple. (A lot of these arguments could be applied to other mediums, art is all sorts of caught up in this idea of seeing.)
This is a bleed over from that popular image of the photographer as a hero or prophet, someone who sees deeper and further than those around them, who stops and pauses and catches the moment overlooked. A visionary. Someone with sight. And to some extent this is perfectly true. You’ll encounter this in a lot of people’s artist statement’s, that they wanted to show their audience what they too often overlook, the beauty of a milk carton in the morning light or the hesitation of a bumblebee. The world as they see it.
This is a good thing. Photography is an astoundingly democratic medium and the way it allows us to reinforce our own individual views of the world is one of the most beautiful (and powerful) functions it fulfills, and while we’re recording the world as we see it individually there’s still some hope for originality. The problem is often that the views put forward are simply melancholic recordings of the everyday, not images that are the result of a deeper insight but perhaps just the result carrying a camera with you on your commute, which we all do now anyway.
Photographers love this idea that they see deeply because it adds a sufficient dose of mysticism to their process to guard against questioning or the ever-present fear of imitation, and makes us look cool to the opposite sex. Melancholic subjects are common, and they all serve to give us pause. But this isn’t sight, this is the camera doing what it is designed to do – stopping the moment to be kept for later. The camera is a Melancholic machine by default (not to mention printing Memento Mori like it’s going out of fashion) (it’s already out of fashion), and Melancholia is an easy emotion to rouse in people. Like a 15 year old girl’s depressing poetry, a melancholic photograph takes the least effort and the least risk in order to gain the most response. This isn’t to say that melancholic photographs are cheap, nasty or bad. Nearly all photographs contain some degree of melancholia by their nature, but when this is all that they embody they just aren’t pushing the medium in the ways it could be pushed. This is a vast blanket statement and I’m overjoyed whenever I’m proven wrong.
The public don’t mind the idea that sight is something of an innate skill because it explains why some people are so skilled and perhaps why others aren’t. You’re just born with it. I’ve seen a flickr user that awards a “YOU HAVE THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S EYE” Stamp to pictures they like, and invites them to their group for photographers they deem to have said eye. The logic being, I imagine, that those with The Eye can spot others with The Eye, like an eyeball secret handshake.
This is another implication of the photographer/hero/prophet idea, which is that while you’re showing the world to all these people who supposedly overlooked it you’re taking on a position of power and wielding it over your audience. As Sontag put it, Photography feels like Knowledge and thus like Power. This is inherent to the medium – while the photograph records it also imposes. We’ll revisit this in another post, but I do find presuming to have more “sight” than the next guy a little unsettling – you’re suggesting you know more about the world than they do, and actually more than they ever could, because they’re just not gifted with the sight you have. A lot of people seem to be fine with this implication too, and it can plant the idea in your head that that the public is just too stupid to “get” your work, so why bother listening to what they say anyway.
A lot of photography educators will privately agree with the idea that you’ve either got it or you don’t. I agree that you cant teach people to see, or at least it’s very difficult to teach them to see, because it’s the same as teaching people to care. You can learn it, but you learn it alone. You don’t get it from a book, or at least not any that I’ve read. The most interesting part of this mysticism of sight is that it ignores the labor of the process (grace). In reality while you cant teach people to see, you do have to learn it if you want to fulfill something more than what your camera already does. Seeing isn’t the key, but rather commitment to sight. That’s why photography is an addiction, something with no end point. There isn’t a day when you’ve won, because the game is always changing, and you stop caring about winning because you just want to see how far it can go. This explains the faith that people find in the photographic image, people like Aleksandr Rodchenko and Dziga Vertov, the belief that it could be used to help change the world because it could readjust the way we interpret and subsequently interact within it.
W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project is the premier example of this commitment, passion, and madness. Smith was also on amphetamines, but he was committed before that.
Go watch Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, which is conveniently on YouTube for the time being.
There we go. That’s my thoughts for tonight. Stay tuned for when I next contradict myself.
