Musings on Photography

Some time ago, I had the extraordinary good fortune to be at a little talk given by the playwright Amy Freed, who at the time had just had her wonderful play The Beard of Avon produced at the Seattle Rep. After the talk, someone asked Amy about the support she’d gotten for her playwriting, and she said

The support I’ve been given has enabled me to take the biggest risk an artist can take - the risk of being understood.
-Amy Freed

I’ve thought about Amy’s statement a lot since I heard her speak way back in 2001. I think she’s put her finger directly on a big issue for the art world.

There’s a lot of art out there which, to borrow Amy’s phrase, doesn’t exactly run the risk of being understood. The artist stepped up to that risk, and then blinked and backed down. There are a lot of artists making art that’s not only not understandable, but isn’t meant to be understood.

I’m not talking about ambiguity. John Patrick Shanley wrote a beautiful, wonderful play titled Doubt, about an ambiguous situation where it appears as if a child has been molested by a priest. The play is deliberately written so that there is no authoritative answer to the question “Is the priest guilty?” Instead, that issue is left ambiguous, and we (as the audience) are forced to consider what we do when we aren’t sure but the stakes are very high if we make a mistake. Shanley’s play is not just ambiguous. It’s about ambiguity and how we respond to it. The play is both ambiguous and eminently understandable.

My fear of that risk is one of the reasons why I tried so hard to force myself to make my SoFoBoMo process be as open as I could stand. Posting my contact sheets felt pretty darn risky. There’s a strong urge to hide your mistakes, and I wanted to experiment and see what would happen if I forced myself to just put there out there in the open and let people look right at it all. I know that other people shared the sense that publishing the contact sheets for every single exposure I made was a risk, because the delay between my hitting ‘publish’ on that first contact sheet post and a friend calling me on the phone to say “What, have you lost your mind?” was about ten minutes. One of the things I wanted to do through SoFoBoMo was get past that fear of being understood.

Anyway, for me this fear was the big hurdle to getting the SoFoBoMo book done. There was a definite point in the process, when I was making the fundamental decisions about what the book would actually show, and it could go one of two ways. It could be a nice safe book of photos, with no text or just bland text. The other option was to go ahead and share more deeply about what my experience was actually like - order the photos and write text in a way that makes it clear what I actually thought and felt. The first book doesn’t run the risk of being understood. The second one embraces it.

I’m not saying that my book was a huge risk. It’s not sharing earth-shattering thoughts. And, truth be told, it probably doesn’t share as deeply or completely as it could, both because I backed off a bit and because it’s not always easy to make yourself be understood. But I did manage to not back off at the moment of that critical decision, and I think that taking that small risk made a big difference in the outcome. I’m a lot happier with the book I finished than I would be if I hadn’t taken that chance.

As SoFoBoMo continues, I’m starting to notice some interesting changes in my day to day photographic process. One change that’s become apparent is that when I head down into the valley with the camera, I no longer have that aching decision when I get to town - turn north or south? Before I started this project, I pretty much flipped a coin, and then just followed my nose. But there was always the nagging feeling that the really good stuff was somewhere else in the valley, and I was missing it.

But with this project, wherever Kodak and I are on any particular day - that’s by definition where the photos are. I can’t be in the wrong place, except in the limited sense that I don’t get the diversity of photos I’d like.

So I read with interest this post of Steve Durbin’s, on Art and Perception. The whole post is interesting, but the part that rang my synchronicity bell was this:

Which leads me to think about the benefits of narrowing one’s focus, one’s effort. The nature of a project is such a focusing, but I frequently wonder if I don’t have too many projects in hand. They often conflict; I can’t do more than one thing at a time, and the time is so limited. Do you also feel pulled in too many directions artistically? Or, on the contrary, do you want to broaden your scope?

I think that for the most part, doing SoFoBoMo amounts to some sort of narrowing of focus. Reading the blogs of the various participants, I certainly notice that most folks have set aside other projects and are focusing fairly intently on SoFoBoMo.

Interesting, I think. For some folks, SoFoBoMo has been taking their regular process, adding in some book stuff, and then compressing the result into one month. And others seem to have branched out and taken a fling at a process that’s quite a bit different from what they usually do.

There’s no right way or wrong way to do SoFoBoMo. Reading the pipe that Gordon McGregor set up, one of the things that both surprises and pleases me is that way that different people seem to be learning such different stuff from their participation. When I first read about NaNoWriMo and NaSoAlMo, I certainly didn’t have even an inkling of some of the stuff people would learn.

And the interesting thing is that so far, most of us are not even close to completing the book. Whatever we’ve learned is a side effect of process, and not part of the intended outcome. One of my continuing fascinations has been that so often, we get the best final result when we focus on process and not outcome - a fact that I no longer find surprising but continue to find counter-intuitive.

It’s probably time for a refresher about the photos I put at the top of the posts here.

As I pointed out in this post, unless it’s specifically mentioned in a post, the photo at the top has no particular relation to the text in the post.

The photos are just taken, based on the whims of the moment, from a pool of recent and not so recent photos that I keep handy, sized for the blog and with the copyright border attached. The photo is often chosen before I even decide what I’m going to write about, although equally often I sit down with the intent to write about some specific subject. Because this process of photo selection is not very carefully controlled, I’ve noticed that I sometimes post a photo twice. That doesn’t have any significance other than highlighting that I make mistakes.

The photos are also not intended to be a display of ‘winners’. Often I’ll use a photo which I think is a loser in some interesting way, or a photo I think is not quite right but worthy of attention because it’s different from what I’ve been doing, or it’s different from my other stuff, or… just interesting in the way it doesn’t quite work. Sometimes they’re photos I wanted to notice particularly because they have some idea in them I found interesting.

And, of course, some are photos I think are winners. You don’t know which ones, because I usually don’t discuss it. When I first started blogging, I wanted to post only winners. It took only a few moments to realize that that wasn’t nearly as interesting as posting works in progress, photos which are sketches for further development, and the occasional puzzling “I thought this was an interesting idea but it doesn’t quite work. Isn’t that interesting?” photo.

I’m guessing that this has a lot to do with my ‘Art is a verb’ attitude. I’m no different from anyone else, and I get a lot of reward from the photos that make me say “Yes! Finally got it right!” but I’ve discovered that I also get a lot of reward out of looking at the photos which are honks and trying to puzzle out why, or looking at photos that that make me sit back in my chair and say “That’s cool. Where the heck did that come from?”

Anyway, this is a bit different from how photos are used on most other photography blogs, so I thought it was worth pointing out once a year or so.

Some time back, Doug Stockdale wrote an interesting post stating that

Up to recently, my web gallery read ‘Douglas Stockdale, Fine Art Photographer’, but now, I have deleted the ”Fine Art” in front of the Photographer subtitle. Just ’Photographer’. When I came back to photography, I had the same insecurity as many others, that is, if you are not sure that what you see (of my photographs) constitutes ‘art’, let me help you and reassure you that I am indeed an ‘artist’. Oh, by the way, painters are really no different, they are just as insecure as the rest of us (I am not a house painter, but a painter of houses), so don’t think that this is just a photo hang-up!

So why the change now? Part of this is getting comfortable in my own skin. Part is getting my series Bad Trip - Sad Trip published in LensWorklast month. The last part is reading David Vestal’s column in the March issue of Photo Techniques about Improper Nouns. And yes, it’s all about the use of the ‘fine art’ words. To summarize two pages, if you have to actually tell someone you are a fine artist, what does that say about you and them??

Those words stuck in my head, and I was vaguely thinking about writing my thoughts about all this but never quite got my thoughts sufficiently gelled to write them down. Or I didn’t try to write them down, so they never gelled. One or the other.

And then when I was reading Writing Past Dark I bookmarked the following passage:

“Why do we seek fame?” a student asks the spiritual teacher Krishnamurti, according to a book entitled Think on These Things.

Have you ever thought about it?” he responds. “We want to be famous as a writer, as a poet, as a politician, as a singer, or what you will. Why? Because we really don’t love what we are doing. If you loved to sing, or to paint, or to write poems - if you really loved it - you would not be concerned with whether you are famous or not… Our present eduction is rotten because it teaches us to love success and not what we are doing. The result has become more important than the action.

I’m not sure I agree with this. I’m confident there are people who are doing things and want to become famous for doing them and yet love what they are doing intensely. Humans are competitive by nature and can’t turn it off even when doing something we love. That said, I do think that this passage highlights something significant and meaningful.

I can’t help observing that although I continue to exhibit work, and I continue to think hard about ways to get my work in front of people, I feel a lot of conflict about that.

Part of that conflict is that the population I’m most interested in having as an audience and buyer of my work is apparently NOT the Art World Approved sort of audience - instead it’s the people who actually live in the places I photograph. Apparently Real Artists are only interested in the common man as a subject, never as an audience. To that idea, I say “Fooey.”

And another part of the conflict I feel is that, as a general thing, I don’t much enjoy the whole showing my work thing. I’m not saying I want to take my work and hide it under a bushel, nor am I saying that showing my work is utterly without reward. What I’m saying is that those rewards aren’t the big rewards. The big rewards are being out and about with the camera, and being at home in the workroom editing, developing, and printing the photos. I’ve always had a bit of a problem when someone asked me “What do you do with all the photos you make”, until one day I learned to take a page from the quilt world, and answer that question with “You don’t ask someone who collects Hummel Figurines what they do with all those figurines, do you?”

I know that everyone gets discouraged at times, and that validation can help us ride out those rough periods of discouragement. But I think it’s a shame that the validation comes from our attempts to earn the “Fine Artist” merit badge and not from a community of people who just think that in general making art as a day to day thing can make our lives a bit more interesting and pleasant.

Lately I’ve caught myself looking at other people’s photography and getting depressed. I look at their great, interesting photography, and I think to myself “Jeepers, Paul. Why are you bothering? Your photos are horrible, and theirs are great.” That’s not good, and it’s probably related to my recent dry spell, and from reading other blogs it seems I’m not alone in this particular misbehavior.

And, it would seem, it’s not anything new. Mr. Shakespeare used that exact train of thought when he wanted to describe someone in the deepest possible funk:

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least…

This man’s art, and that man’s scope, indeed. These are words with which I can wholeheartedly identify. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that this Shakespeare fellow had somewhat more than a clue about the human condition.

Anyway, it seems to me that this business of my comparing my work (or you comparing your work) to that of others is a sneaky trap, lying in wait to catch us at our weakest moments. It’s a trap because implicit in the comparison is the assumption that we’re making a decision to make our art instead of that other guy’s art. That’s not the way it works.

However much we might like to, we can’t make the art another person makes. We can only make the art we make. As I’ve said before, we can’t do otherwise. We don’t get to decide whether to make our own art or someone else’s; the only thing we get to decide is whether to make our art, or not make art at all. If your artistic abilities are limited and you’re looking at the work of someone whose abilities seem unlimited, this seems like a raw deal, because it is. However, it’s still the only game in town, and we’re better off playing the game than sitting down and just feeling bad. We just have to suck it up and take Teddy Roosevelt’s advice that we should “do what we can, with what we have, where we are.”

Go read Andy Chen’s recent post on Madeline L’Engle and rejection.

Apparently I’m not the only fan of L’Engle’s non-fiction autobiographical stuff. What I like is that even if you disagree with her theology (or more broadly with her world view) her insight into the creative process and motivation is worth reading.

Over on Luminous Landscape, Nick Devlin has written an in depth account of his trip to Japan with the G9, well worth reading if you’re considering buying one of these beasties. You will note that Devlin repeats much of what I have said (and others have said) about the G9 before.

The point I’d have people take away from Devlin’s excellent account is that what’s wonderful about the G9 is not that it produces images as noise free as the nearly noiseless EOS-5d (it doesn’t), nor the images are on a par with an EOS 1Ds mk III (they’re not), or even that the G9 is small and light enough to go with you everywhere (I’ve had a fair number of cameras that were smaller and lighter).

The point is more that the G9 is the first easily available camera that was, on all these scales, good enough. It is not the best in image quality - there are many cameras that beat the G9 on image quality. It’s not the best on noise - most DSLRs in the current crop beat it. It’s not the lightest camera nor the smallest. But on all of these scores, the G9 stacks up as ‘good enough to be used for serious work by serious workers’.

I think that’s where the puzzling over the G9 comes from in the reviews I’ve seen written by what I’ll call the ‘non-photographic’ reviewers. They look at the G9 and conclude that, when compared to the best cameras point by point the G9 is often bested by some other camera. What they’re missing is that we can’t take photographs with a camera that consists of Camera A’s noise free sensor, Camera B’s low light sensitivity, Camera C’s lens, and Camera D’s control layout. They’ve missed the fact that although DSLRs beat the G9 on noise and image quality, even a small DSLR won’t fit in your pants pocket. They’ve missed the fact that although there are other small cameras that fit in your pocket, they all have hard to use and frustrating controls.

We can only make photographs with a camera that actually exists, and which we can contrive to have with us when the need to make the photograph occurs. Every camera is a compromise, and the interesting thing about the G9 is not that it’s without compromise but that it’s a particularly interesting set of compromises - a set that never dips below the threshold where some particular aspect of the camera becomes a deal breaker.

The G9 has not replaced my EOS-5d - I still routinely grab the 5d when I’m heading out the door to make photographs. If I could have just one camera, it would be a low noise, high resolution DSLR like the 5d - in fact, for something like 18 months, the 5d was the only camera I used, and I didn’t feel much pinch.

Being a DSLR replacement is not where the G9 is interesting. The interesting thing about the G9 is that it’s let me extend my photography into a place that was hard to reach before - photographs of quotidian things and places where the photos were hard for me to get previously because the cameras that were convenient enough fell short in some other way. Because it’s on every level Good Enough, I now have the G9 with me and make those photos.

And, to put it in the words of Harry Callahan, that makes it just a bit easier for me to use photography as a tool ‘to regulate a pleasant form of living.’

Lately I’ve been doing some reading about image permanence. If we believe the results that Henry Wilhelm is publishing, the prints I make on my Hp Z3100 will last 200 years before visible fading. 200 years is a long time.

Anyway, that got my thinking about how my feelings about photography change as we make the lifespan of prints vary dramatically. How would you feel about your photographs if you knew that the prints would last forever? How would you feel differently if the prints you made would only last a month? A week? Five minutes? Thirty seconds? I don’t think I’d feel too much differently about photography if my prints lasted forever. They last longer than I’ll be alive already. Extending the time beyond my death doesn’t make much difference to me.

At first, I thought that if my prints would only last a few seconds, I’d not be very interested. But suppose I could make a print, put it in an envelope, and send it to someone. When they opened the envelope, the print would last 30 seconds. Would I make prints and send them to people? I very well might.

There are lots of art forms where the artwork gets made, and the instant it’s made, it’s gone. Musicians perform live, and unless some step is taken to preserve the performance, when it’s done, the only thing left is in the memory of the audience. Likewise theater, and dance. And yet, somehow, music, theatre, and dance are all vibrantly alive.

Those art forms are such that, to a large extent, the rewards of artmaking as artmaking, are in this ephemeral performance. Sure, if you’re a playwright, there’s the completed script - but that’s mostly interesting as a mechanism to reach the performance - a play can be viewed as literature (e.g. Shakespeare) but it really isn’t the same as a live performance. And, in some cases nonimprovisational theater is made without a script (see the works of Mary Zimmerman, who develops play during the rehearsal process, starting without a script - I’ve seen a number of her plays, and her work is so incredibly good that I recently traveled to Berkeley, CA just to see a performance of Argonautica. It was well worth the trip.)

Back when I was learning to use a view camera, I burned up a lot of Polaroid material. It was great fun. Because I typically didn’t bother to coat the prints, the prints have all faded horribly. But that doesn’t change how much fun and how much I learned from making those photographs.

There’s no conclusion here. It just struck me as interesting.

Some of the comments (and emails) provoked by my recent musings on print pricing and print sales have accused me of thinking that (as an artist) all you should think about is selling, selling, selling and making money, making money, making money.

I’d like to make my views on this perfectly clear, so I’m going to try hard to write this down in a way that cannot be misconstrued.

I think all people should make art. When I say ‘all people’, I don’t mean ‘all people’ as in ‘all people with great artistic skill’, I mean ‘all people’ as in ‘all living members of the species Homo sapiens’. That is, I believe that, if only everyone would spend a little bit of time making art, the world of people would be a nicer place. I think that virtually everyone’s life is improved by artmaking, and not just art spectating. I believe that when you’re doing it right, art is not a spectator sport.

I also think that, certain fields of artistic endeavor excepted, art should be made without concern over how well it will sell, or even whether it will sell at all. As a general thing, I think that restricting your artmaking to stuff that will sell is probably a soul-killling thing. To put it as plainly as I can, I think the big value in artmaking is not the final product, but the engagement of the art-maker in the process.

That said, once you have engaged in artmaking and you’re left with this artifact that’s a side effect of the process, I don’t see much reason why you shouldn’t try to sell the thing off for a bit of money either to defray expenses or to earn a living. And, once you’ve decided to sell things, I don’t see it as evil or bad to engage in a little thought about how you might sell it at the greatest profit possible.

Some comments have also suggested that I think that art galleries are bad. Again, let me try to write my views so plainly that they can’t be misinterpreted.

I think art galleries can be good or bad. One problem I have with art galleries is that they can’t take much risk - they must show what will sell, and they will only show stuff that they are quite certain they can sell. This is not because gallery owners are fascists, it’s because gallery owners want to be in business next month, so that they can show some more art. But this aversion to risk and requirement of making money imposes constraints on galleries - they can’t take much risk, they can only show art that is currently fashionable, and in general they must price to cover their overhead. And as a result, they can only deal in a narrow range of art, and they can only sell that art into a narrow market. Those two unfortunate facts are not caused by gallery owners being bad or evil or in any way less than stellar folks. They’re caused by the fact that, no matter how perfect the intentions and goals of the gallery owner, the gallery owner cannot suspend the laws of economics.

Finally, I think that the economics of the situation mean that art galleries may be a great fit for artists whose works are made in onesies, but that the same excellent art galleries may not be a great fit for photographers, whose art can now be made (with undiminished quality) in quantities ranging from tens to thousands.

I’ve also been accused of having ‘issues’ with the art world’.

I think that one side effect of the gallery system of art sales is that artists who are trying to get their work into galleries tend to engage in behaviors that they believe will make their art more saleable. Those behaviors are sometimes outrageous, sometimes hugely (and amusingly) conformist, and often both. Often the behaviors consist of ex post facto attribution of preposterous meaning to artworks, and attempts to justify outrageous value of artworks by unsupported attributing to them of various poorly defined qualities. Even worse, I believe that those behaviors are socially corrosive in the sense that they turn the larger public off and convince them that art and the art world are something they have no use for at all.

If this constitutes ‘having a problem with the art world’ then I plead very much guilty as charged.

Folks who think that what I’ve written here is some recent epiphany for me are encouraged to go read Art is a Verb, Not a Noun, People Don’t Buy Art and No One Buys Art Part II, and perhaps The Artist’s Way of Commerce.

Songwriter Ginny Reilly wrote a song titled Did Beethoven Do the Dishes?, the lyrics of which ran (in part):

Did Beethoven do the dishes?
Did Mozart sweep the floors?
Did all those great musicians
have to do their chores?

I can’t help but think of the songs I would write
If I just didn’t have to clean the house.
I’m sure I’d be on top of the billboard charts
if the cat had not just killed a mouse
and brought it into the house, mmm hmm.

This was brought to mind by the fact that I have lots of stuff to do around the house right now. Among other things the pictured pile of logs needs to be cut up (and split). I can’t but feel that I’d be getting a lot more photography done if I didn’t have that pile of logs staring at me.

And then there’s this post on Lisa Call’s blog, about a ‘101 top artist blog list’. I’m not on it, although it doesn’t look like it includes photographers, so I guess I’m off the hook and could now proceed to go find my technorati rank, and figure out where I’d fall on the list (or if I fall on the list at all).

But, like Lisa, I think it seems to be more than a bit in the wrong direction. Blog rank is interesting but from where I stand getting your blog ranked highly makes for an own goal. And, like Colin, I’d rather have room in my life for side excursions when something catches my interest. I’ve spent plenty of time with my nose to the grindstone. There are years and years of my life where I stepped outside one morning and noticed it was winter and the trees were all bare, and I hadn’t actually noticed the shift from summer through autumn to winter. What I want now is to have a somewhat different pace, one where I can still get stuff done but the pace isn’t a crushing burden that keeps me from enjoying the journey. I want to notice the seasons, thanks.

Some things are like a bottle of good wine. If you open it up with the intent to drink it all up, you’re likely to miss out. But if you open it up with the intent to have a pleasant experience, you’re richly rewarded. Attitude and goals seem like small things, but it turns out they can be tremendously powerful. You have to be careful what you wish for, because you’re likely to get it, and the downside is that you’re thus less likely to get things you didn’t think to wish for.

To the extent my photography (and this blog) are goal oriented, the goal seems to be more along the lines of ‘have a nice time’, and not very much like ‘claw my way to the top of the heap’.

Of course, all of this is easy to understand and keep in mind if we just take the time to remind ourselves that art is a verb, not a noun.

(The recent rains and flooding have given me ample time with ‘carry water’. I now return to my regularly scheduled ‘chop wood’.)