Shooting Wide Open

KZSU received a copy of An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area, Pt I and the music director thought it was up my alley. It’s a little collection of photographs from Bay Area photographers like Larry Sultan, Jim Goldberg, Michael Jang, John Chiara, and on and on. The volume isn’t large enough to serve as a reference, but the artist statements in the back of the book were pretty interesting, especially the ones that ventured away from explanation of process to include something of the artist’s own personal experience…

Katy Grannan, Gail and Dale, Pacifica (II)

California sunshine is relentless, even cruel. A lifetime spent in the Northeast makes me suspicious of so much sun, but out West there is no hiding from it.

In upstate New York I photographed a girl who planned to move to California to become a rockstar, or a tattoo artist. She called after returning east to her mother’s house, a year or so later, to say things hadn’t worked out in California. She couldn’t find work. She used to many drugs and was robbed by her friends. Upstate New York was better, she said.

I thought about this girl when I moved to San Francisco. I saw people like her everywhere: in the Mission, in the Tenderloin, downtown on Market Street. How could it be that she – that they – had misunderstood the light?

Oscar Wilde famously stated, “Anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco.” Many of us are still looking for whatever it is we believe the West offers: reinvention, escape… We believe it will be easier here; it will be different.

The sun is shining.

Chauncey Hare, from This Was Corporate America

And then there’s Chauncey Hare’s black and white statement to match his black and white photo. Somebody needs to make a documentary film about this man. It would be fascinating. Or maybe just unsettling.

These photographs were made to protest and warn against he growing domination of working people by multinational corporations and their elite owners and managers.

Richard Misrach, David, from Telegraph 3AM

In contrast, Misrach’s thoughts on the political efficacy of his earlier work:

I began this project when I was twenty-two years old. For almost two years I roamed the five-block stretch of Telegraph Avenue from Dwight Way to the UC Berkeley campus with a camera on my shoulder. I think the fact that I asked permission and was working slow on a tripod actually made people curious and receptive to what I was doing. In every photograph, the street people were looking directly into the camera. This was very important to me. It both suggested their willing participation and their confrontation with the rest of the world. At first I was pretty intimidated, but over time I became a fixture of the Avenue.

It was my first serious attempt at making formally beautiful prints of political content. I also recognized for the first time that creating social change and making art might in fact be at odds. This was a real eye-opener that I’ve been trying to deal with ever since. After Telegraph 3AM was completed, I felt disillusioned. Instead of making an effective political statement, I felt like I ended up with a coffee table book. I’m not sure what I was expecting at the time but it seemed that I had failed. I hadn’t created social change or made particularly great art, but it did get me to reconsider how photography actually functions in the world. Thirty-five years later, I find that the work in fact effectively captures a historical moment. So, perhaps I was too hard on myself back then.

I’m starting to think that political statements in still photography only really effective ask questions instead of declaring things. Experimental photos prompt, what is this a picture of? And much of photojournalism essentially asks the viewer, why do we allow this to happen? To me, there’s something about the muteness of a still that brings more questions to mind than answers.

Not to sound like a 3am self-help infomercial, but… I mean, have you ever found an answer in a photograph? Are photos even supposed to be articulate? I’m reminded of a great quote by Colum McCann in Let the Great World Spin:

The disconnect between his mouth and his mind. That’s where the camera came in.