Shooting Wide Open

Martin Schneider, Central Park, 2:33p Thanksgiving Day 1966, during an air pollution emergency at Con Ed’s Ravenswood facility

I was mulling over the that hairy divide between expressive and constructive documentary photography when I read in Eye of Conscience: Photographers and Social Change this bit about Michael Abramson’s photos of the Puerto Rican Young Lords Party:

Abramson respects the images of the poor and the deprived that Riis and Hine and others have made. But he points out that sixty years later, countless millions here and abroad remain “enlaved in the conditions of poverty, human degradation, and oppression. It is time for photographers to stop photographing the victims of America and begin to record the struggle of those who fight against their victimization.”

Thinking about the difference in those two approaches in terms of victimization makes a lot of sense. How much of a photojournalist’s role is recording the circumstances and outward appearance of vicitimization, and how much is actually helping the victims or changing our own long-term behaviors and beliefs?

A few years ago, while browsing through the winners from the World Press Photo contest, it hit me that almost all the images show darker-skinned peoples suffering and struggling in one way or another. I’ve begun to think Nachtwey is right when he wonders if what he’s doing is somewhat exploitative in the film War Photographer).

Martin Schneider, mercaptan-containing mushroom cloud over pulp mill in Missoula, MT in the Rockies

Maybe the key is, not surprisingly, whether the viewer feels there’s an impact on his own life. While almost everyone feels horrible looking at photos of starving children, I doubt that many people in developed nations ever think they will find themselves in those circumstances, that war and strife will come to them. The photos are heartbreaking but unmistakably distant.

On the other hand, there’s something about Martin Schneider’s photos of air pollution and industrial plants releasing invisible toxic chemicals that is deeply scary in a far more direct way. We could breathe in those chemicals! So it becomes a question of how to demonstrate through visuals that conditions in the developing have an effect on our lives. The point is a very basic one – we are all somewhat self-focused.

I’d guess that the main reason that there has been an increase in interest in China over the past couple of years is that, in spite of the distance, most of us can very easily imagine how rapid industrialization there will affect the West in positive and negative ways, not only in a geo-political sense but simply as a consequence of living in a world of limited resources. Somehow this is going to change our lives, maybe in little ways but likely in big ways, and this makes plenty of us very interested, perhaps moreso because we don’t know.

At the end of the day what distinguishes novelty from lasting new work is that one is fairly disconnected from our lives and can only serve as passing amusement, whereas the other shows us something new about ourselves, even in very indirect ways, that we hadn’t thought of before.

Bruce Wrighton, Basement, Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, Binghamton, NY, 1986

all photos, Felix R. Cid

An unexpected heat wave is a perfect time to hole up in a temperature-controlled sanctuary of books to soak in some Shore and Meyerowitz now that I have finally sussed out what appeals to me about modern landscapes. It’s taken me a while to warm up to the school of Shore and Co. I was at once predictably repulsed by the seeming insignificance of everyday yet drawn to something about the style of the photographs. I think that something is essentially an attempt to show scenes in a visually interesting way that is devoid of the flashy style which reduces the subject to an emotional reaction or abstract concept.

No photograph is objective, but there is something in the sweeping grand style of your average landscape poster print that is an overt lie. In the way that man and his effects on the land are usually ignored or glossed over. In the way that at first glance they virtually scream “Beauty!” and reduce a natural location or event which occurs in context to a visual artifact to coo over. (Come to think of it, yes, see the previous post on museums.) Nature photography in the Adams style may have been somewhat appropriate in the ’20s or ’30s, when most national parks and the tourism associated with them did not exist yet, when less of the world was paved, but to photograph in that style now is either to unthinkingly imitate or to willfully ignore a fairly obvious change in the physical landscape.

For me, this puts a different spin on claims of how ground-breaking or revolutionary an artist is. Choosing trash, industrial offal, plain urban landscapes as subject matter is not breaking from any tradition of depicting serene beauty. It is following in the longstanding tradition of artists’ work reflecting what they see. It’s just that our world has changed enough to be fairly unrecognizable compared to what our ancestors saw. A different physical world means a different visual world, and contemporary visual art is to some extent an effort to parse that new visual world, to update our visual grammar.

When I look at a photo of some Alaskan snowy mountain with reflected in a lake in a fall evening, I perceive it as pleasing not so much because I have decided independently that this is what constitutes beauty, but rather because somewhere, some time, I picked up the notion that certain natural elements are beautiful when arranged a certain way, directly from other people and from sheer repeated exposure to such images in publications and media that are respected. That’s not to say that there wasn’t something potent and novel about such images originally – certainly the colors, scale and unfamiliar peace of striking natural landscape has a visceral impact – but I believe now the punch comes from a socially transmitted visual convention as much as the subject itself.

That’s a long-winded way of asking: in the past, when I was your average snapshooting tourist, did I stop to take a picture of a vista because it was impressive or because it matched a postcard I’d seen? The answer’s murky, but I think it’s safe to say that we all learn some sort of visual vocabulary (or tradition, but I think language is more accurate), a way to understand the world as a visual construct that depends on contemporary styles determined by some intersection of composition, lighting and subject matter.

What we consider intuitive depends on what we’re taught and are accustomed to. This is far more obvious in the history of painting. In pre-Renaissance religious painting, the relative size of human and godly forms was determined not by real life size but by spiritual importance. We had to invent the use of perspective. If I’m not mistaken, there was an experiment where people of indigenous cultures who were shown paintings utilizing perspective found it ridiculous that a large animal like an elephant in the background would be drawn as smaller than a person prominent in the foreground despite, of course, being perfectly able to function in the real world, where large animals are smaller when seen at a distance. They must have a different visual vocabulary.

Text in reviews and on museum walls can sound very, very bloated with insider keywords that ring a bit hollow for the practical-minded in no small part due to the inescapable inanity of trying to articulate visual ideas with verbal language. We’re trying join ideas that exist on two different planes. But sometimes the text makes only vague sense because there aren’t enough images on display for us to learn the language of the artist. New work is challenging because we haven’t become accustomed to that artist’s visual vocabulary.

You know that feeling of finally “getting” an artist? This, I think, is the moment when you finally grasp his visual grammar. You can “get” art without really being able to explain it to other people. Visuals stick in my brain for reasons I can only express through inept hand-waving, and I admit I am irrationally wary of people who park in front of artwork they’ve never seen and immediately spout fluid sentences full of multiple clauses that originate from every cardinal compass point yet slide snugly into place without any violence. In fact, I’m not sure we will ever be able to have a truly thorough and precise discussion of visual art. (Unless we invent a way to project non-verbal thoughts into three dimensional space?)

Sometimes I come upon a photo that’s very “ad-like.” I can’t quite put my finger on it, but my best guess today is that ad work is never visually difficult. It is always easy, either to figure out the visual punch line or simply to parse the photograph in a visual vocabulary you are already familiar with. (It’s a different story with shock value derived from breaking taboos, but I won’t go into that. It seems fairly straightforward.) After all, ads have to be easy to serve their function of delivering a quick impression to people who might not stay long. You’re probably not going to stop and stare while driving by on the freeway or flipping through a magazine (though fashion and beauty magazines… but that’s another story altogether).

But back to our landscape case study. I’ve misunderstood Adams’ role in landscape and art photography. I’ve never liked the work, but that’s probably because I’ve become familiar with his language through the work of those whom he influenced and when I finally got around to seeing his work, it seemed old and conventional already. He is one of those style-changers whose influence is so widespread that it’s difficult to see back past his time. Our visual vocabulary is so altered that we begin to take his innovations for granted. (A little like, in film, the use of flashbacks or non-linear chronology, devices we accept easily now.) I suppose the Adams era is like the Impressionist era – we’ve gotten accustomed enough now that it’s popular.

The moderns, on the other hand, I need to spend more time with. We can digest established artists through iconic singular images because we have already learned their style, but new art is best served in ample portions since we’ve yet to learn and what better way to learn than repetition with variation. Looking at photographs can be a very passive act, but it doesn’t have to be.

Elijah Gowin

I came across the phrase “use vs exchange value” while reading New York For Sale that triggered the memory of a brief moment in the De Young museum. My friend and I were looking at a slit drum from an indigenous culture and suddenly I felt incredibly sad that the instrument will likely never make a sound for an audience again. We’ve preserved only the object, not what it represented or its cultural function. Have we missed the point? Museums are supposed to give us a sense of the lives of others, of past peoples, but how worthwhile is this shallow understanding if it’s based only on objects and appearances in someone’s life instead of the experience of it?

This sort of museum display is comparable to old fashioned zoos where animals were caged in bleak concrete cubes and no attempt was made to situate them in any semblance of their natural habitat. It’s the same mentality of an object for itself as a visual curiosity instead of placement within a context, complex understanding of its functional role. The object or animal is assigned a false cultural or monetary value rather than its true functional value. So instead of adding something to the lives of visitor, to the local community, the object sits in a sterile display, serving mostly as an investment that bolsters the institution’s stats and draws more paying customers. The museum is such a pleasant experience – the lighting and displays look so nice, and the objects are inanimate and incapable of eliciting sympathy, that the comparison seems a bit loopy. But I think it holds.

Wouldn’t it be nice to hear what that drum sounds like? To have either an audio recording of an controlled demonstration or even better, one day of the year when the community is invited to hear/see the drum played live. That’s asking a lot, but in this day and age we probabbly have the technology to make a 3D scan of the drum and reconstruct it from similar materials. Then the original artifact remains intact and we can play the replica at will!

How much fun could we have handling exact replicas of history museum items?

4,592 tons.

Denis Dailleux

Virtually every photo on Denis Dailleux’s site is impeccable. The dense mishmash of Egypt makes our paved streets and boxy buildings look unnatural, inorganic. Progress, eh?

I included that last shot because the probabilities boggle the mind. As a result of quite possibly my worst Netflix decision of all time, I watched (or more accurately, tolerated while multi-tasking) the Snow Queen. Its only saving grace is the kookiness of several talking animals, on whose faces acting doesn’t show so flagrantly. The very next day, I come upon Dailleux’s photo and what is the frozen frame in the TV? Bridget Fonda as the Snow Queen. Are Egyptians drawn to the unfamiliar strangeness of white winter landscapes?

Paolo Woods

I’m incredibly impressed with all of Paolo Woods’ photos, especially his (presumably more recent) color work on Chinafrica, Iran and the Russian nouveau riche. Take a look at his digital contact sheets for easier navigation through his Flash site.

A friend said to me: “Photography is cheap, right? You must have very few costs.”

If you don’t factor in the initial outlay for equipment or film costs, and if you assume that I should not be compensated for time spent on research or studying other photographers, then yes, photography is very cheap. Fine art prints seem expensive to the layman. I was of this opinion until I sat down to consider how much I’d sell a print for. Given that I’m not paid an hourly wage for my work, nor do I produce prints in bulk, and that, theorectically at least, my ideas and creativity have some added value, a couple hundred dollars now seems pretty cheap considering film, printing and framing materials, transportation, darkroom time and man hours spent shooting and printing (assuming, ugh, minimum wage). And I think we can assume, at least within the safety of photographers’ circles, that good photography is not a minimum wage practice in which you can get the same results by indiscriminately replacing one photographer with another. Maybe this is also the consequence of involvement in anything that’s governed largely by subjective taste.

But still, the popular expectation seems to be that since it doesn’t cost you anything in addition to what you’ve already paid to shoot digital, it is reasonable for digital copies to be cheap or free. Forget about recouping gear costs. Forget about possessing skills you acquired over years of practice. Shooting photos is equated with pushing a button, and hot damn, it’s easy and cheap to push a button! We have an annoying habit of ignoring external costs, of anything that isn’t right front of our faces (and sometimes not even then), in photography and with, oh, carbon emissions.

Paolo Woods

In one way or another, I get the impression that for some aspiring art photographers, it’s a point of pride that they can pay the bills with advertising and editorial work, or with a day job, temp work, manual labor. I respect these people, but there’s always a tinge of uneasiness, and it wasn’t until the economy imploded that I knew where this uneasiness came from.

I experience a bit of mental dissonance every time I go to a photographer’s website and beside the portfolios of people in need, of rampant consumerism, there are portfolios of ad work that helps sell product or depict fashionable lifestyles. Quite bluntly, it is depressing that most photographers interested in social documentary work or fine art work with a bent toward social commentary need to support themselves with work that’s not at all consonant with their personal vision. Something tells me that, despite the hard work, there’s really no point of pride in this sort of compromise. Aside from teaching positions and a few grants, for both of which there is fierce competition, ad/ed seems to be the only realistic way a young photographer can support himself. (aside from wedding photography?)

I understand that of course, one’s work has to be judged to be of value to others, that rarely can anyone pursue a personal project with any success without consideration of how it will ultimately be viewed or used by others, but it’s telling about our priorities that inherent value has become almost synonymous with monetary value. I’m not one to get on the “art is high above all else” wagon, but for god’s sake, we’re not talking narcissistic projects with no socially redeeming angle. We’re not talking the sorrows of sentimental young Werthers!

Essentially the message that I get is that the work I want to eventually do is worthless to almost everyone. Until someone pays money for my work, it has no acknowledged value. At this point, I begin to understand why people in social work and the non-profit world burn out or “sell out,” for lack of a better term. Why struggle under the delusion of making a difference in the world, with only the prospects of being poorly paid while having to deal with heavy, soul-crushing issues on a daily basis, when you can go corporate and happily stop shaking in your boots? Maybe all this just means that there are very few projects that are truly socially relevent, but it seems rather inane that there are significant financial disincentives to pursuing such work.

I’m not at all sure who’s to blame for this state of affairs. I’m not sure what the alternative is. Is the market our way of guaranteeing only the most dedicated and talented (and least risk averse?) succeed?

Exhibit A: Eugene Richards‘s Out of Sight, Out of Mind

The photographs that I would like to make, stylistically speaking, differ from the photographs that I could make which would have the effect I would like them to have out in the world. I imagine that for a few photographers, there is no such rift, but for everybody else, it’s not so simple. How do I reconcile a personal style of shooting with the effect I hope to achieve with the photograph as a concrete object?

What I have in mind specifically is photojournalists and the depiction of suffering (more often than not, of non-Caucasian peoples in the developing world). There seem to be two popular approaches. Either a.) show suffering as it happens, in war and conflict, and in hospital wards, with the irrefutable proof of the ravaged human body. The intention of which, to me, is to put the viewer as close as possible to the circumstances of those who suffer, to substitute for the experience itself. Or, b.) create less overtly charged portraits of the subjects, using accompanying text to deliver the real emotional punch. These sort of photos seem to aim to create sympathy for the subjects, to humanize them.

I came upon Eugene Richards’ photo essay on a Mexican mental asylum in Mother Jones magazine. He falls squarely on the side of those who get in your face with the gritty ugly details. His approach is that of classic black and white conflict photojournalism in the style of Nachtwey. In fact, he addresses the choice of styles in his text:

In so many photographs of the disenfranchised, subjects are shot to look wise and dignified, as if there is something ennobling about suffering. We like these images for their optimism — all that serenity makes the squalor more palatable. But all too often, when people are locked up, they lose their dignity. Psychiatric patients rarely look transcendent — mostly, they seem frightened, vacant, miserable. But shooting honest, brutal images presents another problem: That can be too much to bear.

Exhibit B: Jonathan Torgovnik‘s Intended Consequences

On the other hand, we have Jonathan Torgovnik’s photos of Rwandan children born of rape at Aperture gallery. You would be hard pressed to guess at the disturbing stories told through the text by looking at the photos themselves, in which the subjects are not exactly serene but are not overtly emotional.

Is one or the other a more productive, constructive approach for pushing for a remedy of ills? I suppose we need both, but I’m beginning to wonder if either are all that useful. I thought that most photography could easily be divided into two camps: artistic expression and action-oriented documentation, but though they are easily documents, photos from both camps are starting to feel more like personal artistic expression of sympathy toward a cause than a guide for action for a concerned citizen. Basically, they are simplified ads for a cause, and the meat of the issues still need to be hashed out elsewhere.

We are drawn to human interest stories, we want to hear about other people’s lives. That’s a natural impulse. But if we want to instigate long term change, these photos must be about not only suffering and the need for help but also how best to deliver that help, which political situations gave rise to the problem, how our own behavior plays into the situation. Or maybe more accurately, those things should be featured more prominently. Shouldn’t we go further than sympathy and anecdote, stats and suggested donation?

I know that journalism is supposed to be objective, not prescriptive, but given the inherent subjectivity of photographs, pointed analysis and recommendation seem more appropriate. What’s always confused me about balanced journalism is that if informed journalists are not qualified for analysis, the taking of sides, who is? Certainly not the reader who just became aware of the problem? There’s documentation and then there’s investigative journalism. In light of the financial crisis, it seems most of our media falls more on the side of documentation than investigation, and that’s a bad thing. Journalism without ‘investigative’ is simply regurgitation of facts, a transcript of he-said-she-said.

These days, the act of showing doesn’t seem worth much without the so-what. There’s just too much pure documentation floating about. So perhaps this is where photojournalism can go beyond. If photographs are already ‘tainted’ with the photographer’s angle, why not go the whole hog? I suppose, you then have to consider whether a strong viewpoint is off-putting and damaging to the cause, but that’s another story. I thought being apolitical was the way to be accessible to the maximum number of viewers, but perhaps we should make a distinction between prescriptive analysis and evangelical opinionating or political alignment.

Mathew Scott

Paul D’Amato

It seems that the Boston Globe is next.

It also seems that for the past few years, in the words of Radiohead, we have not been paying attention: The Quiet Coup. Or we just haven’t been able to do much of anything about it.

Andrew Bush

I may have mentioned Andrew Bush briefly before, but it wasn’t until I got a chance to flip through Drive that I really appreciated his autoportrait (literally) project. It’s one of the few “20 of something” art photo books that I actually like.