Musings on Photography

It’s been raining, raining, raining. And although I’ve picked up the camera (or tried to) most days since I’ve finished my SoFoBoMo book, it was all dreck and it all felt forced. I kept telling myself, over and over, “The only way out is through.” But it has been sounding a little hollow this past week.

And then, this morning, I picked up the camera and Kodak and I wandered down to where our driveway crosses the stream, just to take a photo of how much water is in the stream - just documentation. The rain had pretty much come to a temporary halt, and the sky was solid overcast, and it wasn’t very bright out.

On the way down the driveway, Kodak got distracted by the smells left behind by something, either the bears or the deer he chased last night. I got distracted by the plants along the way. Everything was wet and glossy, and the sky was a huge softbox, and it all looked mighty fresh and nice, so I started taking photos.

It took a long time to go the 150 feet or so to the stream. It took a pretty long time to come back, too. But it sure felt good.

It’s sometimes hard to remember that it just feels good to be out with the camera in my hands. I’m grateful I was reminded today.

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.

Led by things that appeared in the ‘Search Engine Terms’ page for this blog, I was browsing back over previous entries and comments, and came across this comment on my post about Jeff Wall:

I think the real challenge is that Wall is more or less doing what he can to bury the tradition of documentary photography. You can still find the Gursky’s and Burtynksy’s of the world working - but to do landscapes at this point you need access to places that most people can’t get to, and a strong project.

Maybe it’s just a bit too easy to drive somewhere and take a picture. Might have worked for Ansel Adams, but that was a long time ago.

If you’re doing landscape photography is it really necessary, as this writer suggests, that you have access to places that most people can’t get to?

I’d reject the idea that ‘easy’ has anything to do with it. I don’t think it’s easy to make good, insightful photos of the places we live, I think it’s hard. It’s hard to strip away our labels and our finely tuned ability to gloss over things that we see every day. Paradoxically, it’s hard to make compelling photos of places we see every day, but it’s comparatively easy to go to exotic places and make compelling photos - the mere exotic quality of the place means that the photo can have impact with the viewer even if the photo isn’t particularly insightful.

But it seems to me that the landscape photography I like the best these days is not so much about going to places where no one goes and showing me things that no one sees. It’s mostly photography that seems to be about going places where people go all the time, and showing things that people look at constantly but somehow never happen to see.

I found the following interesting quote:

Local life is intricately dependent for its quality, and also for its continuance, upon local knowledge. Without a complex knowledge of one’s place, and without the faithfulness to one’s place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be used carelessly and eventually destroyed.

-Wendell Berry, A Continuous Harmony

Curiously, the source where I first saw this quote had deleted (without any indication of the deletion) the words “and without the faithfulness to one’s place on which such knowledge depends”. Bad scholar. No biscuit. The quote was also attributed to Berry but no source given.

Fortunately, Google can straighten out such things.

I think I agree with Berry, although I’ll have to ponder some on what faithfulness to one’s place looks like. I ordered the book from the library. So we’ll see.

For those who are wondering why there would be wheelbarrows on display in front of a liquour store, it’s the sidewalk display in front of the combination hardware/liquor/wine/lumber/feed store in Carnation, WA. This is one stop shopping at its finest. If you can’t buy it here, you can probably either live without it or find it over at the grocery store. On one recent visit to this store I bought 1/4×3″ eye bolts, a can of spray paint, and a large bottle of Absolute Mandarin vodka.

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.

Lately much of the energy I had been pouring into this blog has been going into helping get a local artists’ organization off the ground. Much of the focus of the new organization is on connecting with different alternative venues (restaurants, banks, etc.) and getting display space, then putting the member artists’ work into those display spaces on a rotating basis.

I think this is important, not just because it helps artists sell work but because it builds community awareness that artists live among us. As an example, we recently had a booth at a local equestrian fair, along with various other artists. The woman who organized the art portion of the fair had a huge booth representing several local artists. It turns out one of the artists she represented was Linda Adams. Now, the interesting thing is that Linda is someone I know - Linda is one of the baristas at the Carnation Starbucks. I’ve been buying lattes from Linda for years now, but I didn’t know about any of the art she makes.

It seems to me that our communities are better off with artists in them. Maybe that’s mostly an article of faith for me, rather than something I can demonstrate logically. It isn’t that I think artists are somehow morally superior to everyone else - in fact, I find that notion (common in the art world) to be more than a bit upsetting. But I do think that nearly everyone’s life is enhanced by a little artmaking, and it’s a lot easier to allocate time to do a bit of art after washing the dishes if everyone else is doing it too.

So although I’m constantly conflicted about the value of doing shows, about the value of getting your work out into the community where it gets seen, and how much I want to orient my photography around selling prints, I’m starting to realize that doing those things can have a big impact on the fabric of the community.

So I read with great interest this post by Dave Beckerman, about Ansel Adams trying to get Paul Strand’s work for a show in his gallery, and Strand’s refusal. Strand’s response to Ansel’s request was

Nevertheless I cannot say yes to an exhibition of my things at the present time. Actually I have little interest in exhibitions because at the basis they exploit the artist to entertain the public free of charge. I can never get used to the idea that pictures are free entertainment in the U.S., elsewhere too, that the people who claim to enjoy a thing never support the individual who makes what gives them pleasure.

Dave goes on to comment “Can you imagine Strand in the age of photoblogging?”

I think that Strand is missing part of the point - that by hanging his work in a show, he improves not just the art world but the world in general. Now, it’s Strand’s work, and I think wholeheartedly that artists should have unrestricted rights to decide what happens to their work. But it’s worth considering that when we get our work out before the eyes of our community (and here I mean community in the broadest possible sense) there are benefits that can’t be measured easily and are not represented by currency - benefits like finding out that Linda, the friendly barista, is actually a very good artist.

Copying the work of other artists gets a mixed review in the art world.  Outside of the photo world, copying the work of the masters is widely regarded as a great way to learn technical skills.  Even in the photo world, there’s a sort of grudging allowance that copying the work of the masters is a good way to polish your technique.

Outside of this, though, there’s not much respect for work which is even derivative of someone else’s work, let alone outright copying of someone else’s work.  The prevailing sentiment is that your work should be original.  Originality and creativity are very important, I hear.  If it’s not original it can’t possibly be creative, and if it’s not creative, then it’s not Upper Case Art; at best, it might be lower case art.  If fact, the argument goes, if it’s not completely unprecedented in the history of humanity, then it’s not really original and thus… it’s not really Art, so why the hell bother?  (I think that’s a load of hooey, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make right now.  Maybe later.)

Despite my ambivalence about it, I’ve lately been looking at the work of various photographers.  Rather than examine them to build my technical skills, or even to try to get inspired, I’ve been taking a different tack.  I’ve been looking at photos, and I’ve been pondering the understanding and motivation of the photographer.  So I’ve looked at Deborah Marlin’s photographs of Golden Retrievers, and I’ve been pondering “Why this photograph, and not some other one?  Why photograph dogs at all?  Why not cats, or turtles, or people?  Why not photographs of the beach, or photographs of beach houses, or even photos of bicycles or cars?” 

It occurs to me that one of the aspects of copying is that in order to really do a good job copying, you pretty much have to get yourself into a state similar to that of the artist you’re copying.  So, in the process of making photographs of Golden Retrievers that are ’similar to’ or ‘inspired by’ or ‘outright knockoffs of’ those done by Deborah Marlin, you’re probably going to learn something about how she feels about dogs in general and Goldens in particular, and it seems to me that this stuff you’d learn would probably be different from or perhaps deeper than what you’d learn just by looking at the photos. 

The psychologist William James told us “If you want a quality, act as if you already have it.”  We always think that it’s our inner state that drives our outward actions, but the converse is true, too. 

Anyway.  What I’m trying to get at in a very roundabout way is that maybe, just maybe, there’s some value to copying/imitating/ripping off an artist than just sharpening technical skills.  Maybe the value, which I haven’t seen discussed anywhere, is that copying work might be a way to getting a deeper understanding than just looking at it.

For quite a while, I spent a lot of time photographing on the coast.  It involved a fair amount of travel.  Then I moved, and since then I’ve tried to focus on photographing close to home.  That cuts into the potential audience for my work, because there are far fewer people interested in the Snoqualmie Valley than there are interested in the Pacific coast of Oregon and Washington.  But, since the primary audience for the work is me, and I’ve been more interested in the Snoqualmie Valley than I am in the coast, I did the photography where the interest was.

Lately, it seems I don’t even have much desire to head down to the valley. So I’ve been photographing closer to home - mostly within a few hundred yards, but often much closer to that. I’m not sure what that’s about, but I’m pretty sure that the way to figure it out is to just go with the flow and make the photographs that I want to be making when I want to make them.

This weekend it got quite windy, and during the period of high winds on Saturday morning one of the big bitter cherry trees let go and started leaning low across our driveway.  So I got out the chain saw and I cut the tree  down, and then I cut off all the branches and bucked the trunk up into pieces.  And then I got out the chipper, and fed the branches through.  All the while, the foreground part of my mind was concentrating on things like not cutting off my foot, and not having my hand dragged into the chipper while it was running - your basic high priority stuff if you happen to be fond of your extremities. 

Meanwhile, the background part of my brain was chugging along thinking about why I worry about outside influence on my photography.  That generalized into pondering about the mass media onslaught that’s such a problem for so many folks - not just artists who find it makes for a bad influence on their work, but a lot of folks who feel that the mass media aren’t a positive factor in their lives.

And then I stumbled across across the following quotation:

As long as I assume that the world is something I discover by turning on the radio … I am deceived from the start.

-Thomas Merton

I think this touches directly on the problem.  When we take in the world through radio or TV or magazines, we’re not getting a direct view of the the world, we’re getting a view provided by an intermediary who, no matter how good the intentions will always add interpretation. When I’m looking at the photography of other people, I’m seeing the world through their eyes.  That can be good, or it can be bad, but no matter what it amounts to experiencing reality through an intermediary.  When we watch the mass media, it’s even worse, because the various interests in the mass media aren’t interested in just presenting reality, they’re interested in advancing their agenda.  (I’d note that photographers and other artists often do the same thing).

One of the things about making photographs myself, as opposed to viewing photographs made by others, is that for me to make the photographs I do, I have to actually contend with reality directly.  I don’t mean this in the sense used by Mary Chase’s character Elwood P. Dowd, who remarked “I’ve wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I’m happy to state that I finally won out over it.”  When I say ‘contend with reality’ what I’m saying is that to make a photograph of what the forest looks like in the rain, I must actually be in the forest in the rain.  Unless, of course, I take a page from Jeff Wall’s playbook and construct a fake forest in my studio, filled with fake plants, and then contrive to dump fake rain on it while I make photographs.

Mass media, the internet, books - all add to the reach of our experience at the expense of including an intermediary in that experience.  In order to make photographs of reality, though, we must have a direct experience - no intermediary.

There is a real world out there - an objective reality that can be photographed.  Interestingly, the process of making photographs of that reality immerses us in it, and the process of looking at the photographs we’ve made moves us one step away from it.