I Can See it For You Wholesale

I have three quick responses to Miguel Garcia-Guzman’s post on Blake Fitch and a quick trip to her site:

1. Fitch’s site is one of the worst examples of bloated flash interface I’ve ever encountered.
2. Garcia-Guzman describes Fitch’s work as “Simple but interesting images full of life that look spontaneous and fresh. Images that convey the significance of casual moments.” I disagree. They look to me like images from a clothing catalog. As though Fitch’s first name were not “Blake” but “Abercrombie &”
3. Fitch says: “My focus has been on my youngest sister and cousin. I hope to have captured the simple moments in her search for her own identity as it becomes publicly displayed.” This gives me some of my internet acquaintances would refer to as douchechills. What a horrible thing to want to do to someone.

I’m sure I’m missing the point. I will try to return to this at a later date and attempt a deeper understanding.

Blake Fitch | [EV +/-] Exposure Compensation.

Note:

This is the start of a series of rapid-fire reflections on posts in the photo-blogo-sphere-o-thing. These are not necessarily reasoned responses, they certainly aren’t carefully edited, and they definitely aren’t based on full knowledge of the subject. Thus: “Snap Judgment.” I nonetheless want to do this as a way to force myself to read and think about posts that I’m otherwise all too likely to star in google reader and then forget all about.

Please feel free to correct erroneous assumptions on I may make. And know that I don’t intend to offend.

To continue on my Simone Weil theme of a week or so ago, here is another quote of hers of which I am very fond:

“Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right to the soul.”

Weil is referring to the heart-stopping aspect of art — the way that a particularly beautiful work, can seize our attention in a way that sort of shuts down or fades out the chatter of our bodies and minds, giving the viewer/reader/listener a sense of pure observation, akin to meditation or spiritual communion or — at the risk of sounding quackish — the “flow” state described by Csíkszentmihályi and folks.

This is an aspect of photography which is of great importance to me. I became seriously interested in photography around the same time I started noticing myself slipping into a frame of mind I was more familiar with from the meditative practices I more or less abandoned years ago. A basic technical fluency (fluency meaning no need to think about the operation of the camera as I operated it) combined with a kind of disciplined vision (a “trained eye,” although how well-trained at that time, or the present?) caused me to photograph without overt thought. Just eyes and hands and legs adjusting position, framing, focusing, shooting. And every now and again, when I’m both good and lucky, I can put enough of that into the photograph that the viewer, too, will be seized by the image, and look with a still mind.

Of course, I’m usually not both good and lucky at the same time, and all too often, I’m neither. : )

But something that worries me, in general, and with my upcoming sofobomo project in particular, is that in some cases some of my best work — or what I consider my best work — may not have enough initial eye-catching-ness to gain and keep the attention needed for the viewer to give the image a chance. It seems like popular photography skews hard toward images with a “wow factor” — whether in heroic content or bravura technique or intense manipulation — that make them leap off of a screen of flickr thumbnails. (Although this problem is not a digital innovation — I think it goes back at least as far as the ascent of Ansel Adams (as opposed to Edward Weston or Minor White or other folks of that general time) in the mind of lay photographers and the general public. The flickr thumbnail is just an incarnation of the problem I happen to encounter on a regular basis.)

I’m very wary of creating images whose success is based on such a “wow factor,” because the typical response to such images is, “Wow, I wish I was there,” or, “Wow, how did you do that,” or, “Wow, I wish I had that lens/camera/film/etc.” This is not the response I want to evoke, or at least not all of the time. (Sometimes it’s inevitable; you can’t take a non-crappy picture of a bird without getting these responses.)

So, partly because of this issue, my sofobomo project (“Engulf”) is deliberately constructed to avoid as many “wow” factors as possible. The subject — small-scale conflict of nature vs. civilization — is not at all heroic. (By small-scale, I mean manifestations in highly mundane urban settings — for example, a tree which is growing around a metal pole and engulfing it.) I’m not utilizing sophisticated lighting techniques or macro lenses, or naked ladies. In fact, many of the images will be of largely two-dimensional subjects.

This leaves me with a limited vocabulary of photographic elements — texture, color, and shape, essentially. This prevents me from getting caught up in the arms race of eye-catching “wow”-ness — but I wonder if it won’t also get in the way of the deeper goal that Weil described — I worry that if I do not catch the eye, I cannot captivate the flesh.

The problem or question of reality is something that has always been at the heart of photography. I suppose this is true to some extent of all representational media, but it is especially true of photography, which has always enjoyed a sort of privileged access to human gullibility, despite the fact that photographic methods are really no more intrinsically truthful than any other.

And I think to a considerable extent, the nature and value of a photograph (or of a photographer) is defined by their relationship to reality, or to the sense of reality. I do not mean to say that photographs ought to be true to life, or that retouching should be penalized. Images which falsify, or images which are surreal or fantastic, are not inferior to images which report things plainly (or attempt or pretend to). But I think a great deal can be read from how a photograph (or photographer) uses the sense of reality as a photographic tool. Do they (try to) tell the truth? Do they challenge what is (or appears to be) real, and encourage the viewer to do so? Do they merely deceive the viewer? Do they invite the viewer to deceive themselves? And, of course, how well do they accomplish these things?

Of course, if one is going to try to take a position relative to reality, one must have some sense of what and where reality is, which (as an empiricist) I regard as a fantastic and largely insoluble problem in itself. Of the many imperfect attempts to address it, one of my favorites is that presented by Simone Weil to an introductory philosophy class taught to a bunch of doubtless very confused high school students. Here are a few quotes:

One can never really give a proof of the reality of anything; reality is not something open to proof, it is something established. It is established just because proof is not enough. It is this characteristic of language, at once indispensable and inadequate, which shows the reality of the external world.

Reality comes into view when we see that nature is not only an obstacle which allows us to act in an ordered way but it is also an obstacle which infinitely transcends us.

There is nothing real whenever there is nothing unforeseen. In science, in reasoning, one sees in the problems one is dealing with only what one has put there oneself (hypotheses). If in actions there was nothing except what we ourselves suppose them to contain, nothing would ever get done, since there would be no snags. All sorts of accidents can occur between the time when I have seen what the problem is and the time when I have acted. Reality is defined by that. It is what is not contained in the problem as such; reality is what method does not allow us to foresee. Why is it that reality can only appear like this, in a negative sort of way? What marks off the self is method; it has no other source than ourselves: it is when we really employ method that we really begin to exist. As long as one employs method only on symbols one remains within the limits of a sort of game. In action that has method about it, we ourselves act, since it is we ourselves who found the method; we really act because what is unforeseen presents itself to us.

Of course Weil is a religious thinker, and one of my favorite religious thinkers, but what she points us toward here is a kind of faith which applies equally to religious and non-religious folks. It is the fact that in order for our thinking and action to go beyond the level of game-playing, we must make a leap of faith (or, in Weil’s terms, an act of love) with regard to the world around us.

And if this faith is not present in our photographs (or in logical inquiry, or in scientific research) then our efforts are only (at most) a “symbolic game”…

PS

There was a nice quote in the Magnum twitter feed a while back that relates:

http://twitter.com/magnumphotos/status/1306304382

There’s also a nice quote or two in Beaumont Newhall’s History of Photography that I’ll try to dig up later.