Musings on Photography

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’.)

From the BBC website, a link which reads “Day in Pictures: Some of the most striking images from around the world“. (there’s no reason I’ve picked on the BBC version, here. I just saw it when reading an article on Vint Cerf. There are similar links on the web page for every news service on the planet.)
“Striking images,” I thought. I looked at the images, and they were, indeed, striking. Exotic. Unusual, extraordinary. Striking, fair enough. But, I wondered, what of the claim that this is represents a worldwide day in pictures? Um, not so much.

The news focuses on the striking. If it’s not something bad, it’s go to be something exciting or exotic, something the news people think lies outside our daily life. You don’t read about the pleasures of the quotidian in the newspaper, nor do you see still photos or video of it on CNN.

That’s fine, but I think it increasingly leads us down the wrong path. The problem is that it causes us to live out there, instead of right here. It’s not that out there is bad. Things and places and events which are ‘out there’ for me are, naturally enough, ‘right here’ for someone else. The difficulty creeps in when we attend to ‘out there’ to the extent that it interferes with our ability to be ‘right here’.

In that Jungian synchronicity way, I’ve been getting this message from a lot of different directions lately. From Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales (a book about why some people survive and others perish), the author lists the first rule of survival: be here now. And, from Paul Lester’s recent posts on photography, Taoism, and his personal spiritual journey - “This simply means that I need more practice in staying in the ‘now’.” And from Doug Plummer’s blog, where he writes so eloquently and transparently about his own creative process, “My entire work life and artistic life is dependent on deep connection and communication with my surroundings, and working from that place.”

And that sort of highlights a paradox. You can’t make good photos, it seems, unless you’re right here, right now, not just physically but also mentally. And yet, at the same time, I sometimes have to remind myself to put down the camera, not worry about capturing this moment, and just be here now.

So sometimes the camera is a tool that helps me be here now. And other times, the camera is a distraction that interferes with my ability to be here now.

Canon have announced new cameras, including the much anticipated and already much discussed EOS-1ds mk III and what looks to be a really nice small camera, the G9. Nikon have also announced new cameras, including a full frame (24mmx36mm) body, which presumably will cause a lot of Nikon lovers to stop talking about how the 24×36 is too large. Rumor has it Sony is ready to respond with announcements of their soon-to-be available camera bodies. Already, the internet is abuzz with discussion of the important advances these new camera bodies represent.

And in unrelated news, the essential bits of the actual art of photography remain unchanged. Remember, you read it here first.

At the end of the first lecture by one of my favorite professors, the professor asked “Are there any questions?” I raised my hand, and when he pointed at me, I asked “Is there an objective reality?” (the course was not a philosophy course, it was a course on finite mathematics and formal languages.) Amazingly, the professor did not kill me outright.

Anyway, I’ve spent more than my share of time pondering whether there’s an objective reality. I think the answer is yes, but with qualifications. The qualification is this: we stumble through this existence, and because understanding how the world around us works is a key to survival, we’ve got a large part of our brain dedicated to figuring it out. You don’t have to be highly capable at coming up with symbolic solutions to differential equations to catch a thrown object, because there’s a big chunk of your brain that’s figured out how to do ballistics. We go around, constantly building a mental model of the world, and we run this model forward in real time, and we use it to make useful predictions like “After I fire this arrow, that bird in motion will continue to move, so I’ll aim such that the arrow and the bird end up in the same place at the same time, and henceforth I’ll call this situation ‘dinner’.” That is, we use this model as a map to navigate through life.

The problem is this: we start out life with very simple maps, full of large gaps. Even worse, our ability to model things in our head is strictly limited, and reality is comparatively unlimited. So our maps start out not very accurate, and slowly improve, but they will always contain errors. Cartographers (and explorers, and hikers, and in general all users of the cartographic arts, as well as the followers of Alfred Korzybski) remind themselves of this problem by stating “The map is not the landscape”. In any disagreement between reality and the map, the map loses. In other words, maps always contain errors. The landscape never contains errors, it just *is*. Maps have gaps where there’s no information; reality does not.

To make what is turning out to be a longer story into a shorter one, I’ve concluded that one of my reasons for making art is that it’s a way for me fill in the gaps in my map. I went to the coast, and I made a lot of photographs there, and in the process I filled in a lot of the gaps in my map of ‘beach’. My map of ‘beach’ now has more information about beaches, and is more accurate. I’ve made thousands of photographs of the area where I live, and as a result my map of the area is far more detailed and interesting than it was.

(those of you interested in maps, models, and utility will find this article in Wikipedia to be a pretty good overview. Just remember that a wikipedia article is, in a sense, just a map, and not the territory.)

Browsing Matt Alofs blog, I came across this post, quoting Harry Callahan as writing a grant proposal that asked for money so that he might “photograph… to regulate a pleasant form of living”. Well, that really rang my chimes. But I’m wary of my old nemesis, the ellipsis, which often hides cunning retargeting of words. (it’s not that I distrust Matt. It’s that often the ellipsis is passed on, generation to generation, so Matt might have inherited it, as it were).

A quick search with Google landed me on this page (link points to the Google cache, because the full text page requires a subscription.) which gives a somewhat fuller quotation and a reference:

When he was 34, Callahan wrote what might remain the truest and most naïve of all grant proposals. He was asking for money “to photograph as I felt and desired; to regulate a pleasant form of living; to get up in the morning — free, to feel the trees, the grass, the water, sky or buildings, people — everything that affects us; and to photograph that which I saw and have always felt.”

Perhaps the most radical part of this extraordinary plea for help is the phrase “to regulate a pleasant form of living.” Callahan was not a verbal person, but after very hard work he sometimes found the necessary word. In this instance, I think he got it precisely right: The function of his photographs was not merely or primarily to express the quality of his life, but to define it — to give it shape and structure, by allowing him to spend his days seeking those occasional victories that confirmed the existence of a minimal, necessary beauty.

To ask for other people’s money in order to improve the quality of one’s own life is unusual; the common thing is to propose that one’s work will in some fairly direct way improve the lives of others, generally some group that is materially or spiritually less fortunate than the applicant, and much less fortunate than the prospective donor. Callahan seemed never confused about this; he understood that he was an artist, and that his work would help others only if and as they might be helped by art. He hoped that “when the photographs are looked at they will touch the spirit of people.” As a decent man, he hoped to be useful, but he knew that he had little control, or none, over whose spirits he might touch, and the question was in a sense irrelevant, since it would not affect what he was driven to do.

For me, this touches on an important point. As a pastime, artmaking is fraught with peril. You make some art, you put it out there, and after that, it’s out of your control. You can, as Mark Hobson has done, write an artist statement that attempts to direct your audience in their interpretation of your art, but (despite Mark’s umbrage) it turns out that you can lead an audience to your intentions but you can’t make them think. Well, you can’t make them think the way you want, anyway; people are annoying that way.

So in the end it seems to me that if there are reliable rewards to artmaking, the Callahan quotation suggests a good target. I like the idea that we might use artmaking rather the way we use regular exercise - as a mechanism to regulate our lives so that they are more fulfilling and more meaningful to us. If we’re quite lucky the outcome might have some positive impact in the world beyond. Or not - you make your art, and you take your chances.

Anyway, Callahan’s grant proposal gets my vote as the most sensible articulation of a good reason to make art that I’ve ever read.

This past week here in Carnation has been hot.  Not just hot, but hot and humid - a combination which puts my body into automatic go slow mode.  How I survived growing up on the east coast, where summers are always hot and humid, I’ll never know.  But the point is that for the past week, I’ve been trying to keep the activity level low, and that’s left me plenty of time to think.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, part of what I’ve been thinking about is slowing down.  And in one of those delightful synchronistic events, I came across this excellent video of a lecture by Carl Honore.  For those of you who are too impatient to watch a video that’s 19 minutes and 26 seconds long, I’ll give you the brief version - faster is not necessarily better.   

That’s been my conclusion for a while.  There are lots of things in life where taking a slower, more deliberate approach improves the experience and the outcome.

Paradoxically, sometimes slowing down requires speeding up.  What I have in mind, here, is speeding up along the lines of the Shakers’ attitudes toward things.  The Shakers were early practitioners of deliberate simplicity.  But while it’s possible to pursue simplicity by avoiding technologic advancement, the Shakers took the opposite tack, inventing an incredible stream of labor saving devices (including the clothespin, the circular saw, the flat broom).  They designed rooms and furniture to reduce the labor needed to clean the room.  Higher efficiency of labor, the Shakers reasoned, left more time for the important things (like prayer).

That’s like my view about efficiency when working a large format camera (or any camera, for that matter).  The more time taken up by camera fiddling, the less time we have for attending to what we’re photographing.  More efficient cameras and more efficiency in our handling the mechanical details of making exposures lets us have more time for making the artistic decisions that matter.

 All that’s fine and good, but there’s another way of slowing down, and that’s to set the camera up, and just make long exposures.  The photo above is a case in point, being a fairly long exposure (working from memory, the exposure was tens of seconds long).  The delightful part is that the wonderful iridescent pattern in the center of the frame wasn’t visible when viewing the scene in real time.  I didn’t know it was there; I made the photo because I liked the arrangment of rocks, and got a pleasant surprise when I developed the negative and found the long exposure made this pattern visible.

All this touches on the wide versus deep thing.  It seems, at first blush, like slowing down means that we’ll get less done, but in practice it doesn’t work out that way.  It seems like moving more slowly means we should see less, since less of the world passes in front of us over a given time.  But what happens is that moving more slowly, we see more deeply.  And it seems like making longer exposures should mean that we just have fewer exposures, and that we won’t get anything from the longer exposures.  And yet, sometimes long exposures reveal things that short exposures won’t.