I Can See it For You Wholesale

Spielberg returned to Shanghai for Empire of the Sun, an eerie sensation for me — even more so were the scenes shot near Shepperton, using extras recruited from among my neighbors, many of whom have part-time jobs at the studios. I can almost believe that I came to Shepperton 30 years ago knowing unconsciously that one day I would write a novel about my wartime experiences in Shanghai, and that it might well be filmed in these studios. Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences. (The Atrocity Exhibition, p. 11)

The mind is in large part bibliographic. (Biography recapitulates bibliography?)

It is not precisely that we are what we read, but there is a nontrivial relationship between what we read (or, more specifically, what we will subsequently be ready to admit having read) and our basic interests, dispositions, methodologies, etc. So, there is a certain correspondence between the sources of our personal bibliographies and the sources of ourselves. Assigned reading is part of one’s intellectual origin story.

I am sometimes surprised or disconcerted when I am recalled to the earlier parts of my own bibliography — not because I read horrible trash (although of course I did) but because sometimes the foreshadowing seems obnoxiously heavy-handed.

One of the more extreme examples is Nancy Frankenberry’s Religion and Radical Empiricism, a book which brings together James and Nagarjuna, among others, not to mention Quine’s “Two Dogmas.” I read it in high school after buying it on a whim because I happened to see it on a local bookstore’s shelf at a time when I was thinking a lot about the word, “empiricism.” (The reason I was thinking about “empiricism” is that I had been embarrassed not long before because I had not known the word’s definition.)

I flipped through it, was briefly turned onto William James as a result, and then subsequently forgot all about it. In subsequent years, I became deeply interested in pragmatism — as an extension of problems in philosophy of education — and in some of the more skeptical variants of Buddhism — as an extension of internal consistency problems in my new-age upbringing. Later, when I once again flipped through a copy of Frankenberry’s book, I felt…horribly presaged, I suppose.

It is impossible, of course, to say what precisely the chain of causality here is. Some of the underlying concerns and approaches are fairly fundamental; it may have been inevitable, given interests and concerns that go back far deeper than my high school years, that I should be drawn later to thinkers like James and Nagarjuna, or the glee with which I took to, especially, Nagarjuna and Quine, may have been a direct result of the subconscious memory of some of those connections I’d seen in Frankenberry’s book.

More likely the truth is somewhere in between, but in any case, I find it acutely unnerving to feel that such interests–which are closely tied to very fundamental aspects of my intellectual process and disposition are in some way fated.

I’m having a similar feeling now as I read through Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition. This is another book that I read when I was of high school age. In this case, it was loaned to me by the only person I had met (up to that point) who was not only better-informed than me about the things I was interested in, but manifestly (and significantly) smarter than me in ways I valued. I read it and enjoyed it, up to a point, but I was (and largely am) too literal-minded to fully appreciate that kind of work. Certainly I did not anticipate that, after setting it largely aside, I would later find it directly useful in approaching an intellectual problem (ruin porn, to be specific) in photography.

In fact, there’s quite a lot of juicy photographic thinking in The Atrocity Exhibition. I just never made the connection before, because when I first read it, I had zero interest whatsoever in photography. This is worrisome, because my photographic origin story is so absurd (it involves my previous hobby of knitting, and my long-undiagnosed poor eyesight, among other factors), that I had pretty much taken for granted that it was entirely discontinuous with my previous intellectual history.

That being said, Ballard’s photographic interests are largely confined to areas of photography that — well, it’s not that I don’t approve of them, or don’t like them, so much that I think of them as someone else’s problem or task. I think no causative element can be found here, just a reminder that…while the world appears to become a more complicated and information-rich place as we mature, it is actually just that we (all too slowly) acquire the ability to perceive and appreciate the complexity that was always there, even in our own experiences, even in those experiences to which we may have given our full attention.

A few weeks ago I read Mirrors and Windows, by John Szarkowski. (About whom we’ve posted once or twice before at 1/125.) It’s pretty fantastic.

I’ve tried quite a few times since then to write a useful post about the subject, with little success; each draft tends to spiral out of control, until I feel like I’ve written myself into the middle of a book-length disquisition on the nature of photography. That’s an easy trap to fall into with Szarkowski, because he’s such a moving target; his writing is so rich with information, allusion, interpretation, and provocation that it is hard to keep attention focused on any one argument or claim.

So, I’m going to give up on trying to write one coherent post on the book tackling everything that really interests me (which would still have only touched on a fraction of everything contained in the brief essay in Mirrors and Windows) and write two or three shorter posts, instead.

Let’s start with this passage:

During the first century of his existence, the professional photographer performed a role similar to that of the ancient scribe, who put in writing such messages and documents as the illiterate commoner and his often semiliterate ruler required. Where literacy became the rule, the scribe disappeared. By 1936, when Moholy-Nagy delcared that photography was the lingua franca of our time, and that the illiterate of the future would be he who could not use a camera, the role of the professional photographer was already greatly diminished from the days in which his craft was considered a skill close to magic. Today it is only in a few esoteric branches of scientific or technical work that a photographer can still claim mysterious secrets. (pp. 14-15)

This interests me because I think it helps me understand a confusion many photographers have regarding the nature of what they do.

Following the metaphor, let us assume that we are living in a time after that in which the scribe had a useful role — a time in which (in developed nations) everyone has the ability to read or write for themselves.

In that context, what do we make of someone apparently performing the functions of a scribe? Examples might include:

• Translators
• Editors, designers, etc.
• Paralegals
• Medical transcriptionists
• Notaries Public
• Calligraphers

These are people who have technical skills which are not required for the normal, everyday reading and writing functions routinely performed by people in both their business and personal lives.

There are photographic equivalents to many of these functions — or, rather, there are photographic professions which have a similar relationship to the photo-literate as these professions do to the word-literate. For example, I doubt one hears the complaint that, “with digital, everyone is a crime scene photographer.” (Note: If there are any forensics people reading and I’m getting that wrong, please let me know.)

However, most types of professional photography currently being done today are not so well sequestered from the realm of everyday, non-professional photography, which is usually (although not quite accurately) classified as “amateur.” But there may still be parallels.

Of these post-scribe forms of technical literacy, the last — calligraphy — is the one that I find to be the most interesting in relation to photography. For our purposes, let calligraphy be defined as the practice of making series of written letters appear aesthetically pleasing; it is (or at least, can be) totally agnostic with regard to the meaning of words represented by those letters. It is about making things pretty, on demand.

I think calligraphy is interesting in relation to what people want from photography. Specifically, to what they want when they first become excited about photography — when they stop regarding it as a routine task requiring no special knowledge or insight and begin to regard it as something they can and should do well. Perhaps even as something which they are called to do well.

When people today feel that way about the written word, virtually none of them say, “I want to be a calligrapher.” They want to be novelists, or poets, or journalists, or what have you. They want to write something in which other people can find meaning, amusement, excitement, solace, escapism, or insight.

But when people feel that way about photography, huge droves of them turn to the photographic equivalents of calligraphy — like wedding photography, commercial portraiture, stock photography, and advertising — disciplines which are, at heart, dedicated to producing prettiness on demand.

Budding photographers are often obsessed with becoming skilled in technical areas related to these disciplines, so that they can be more “pro” — which, amusingly, means that these industries are generally less and less sustainable for those who actually do set up shop in them. (And, as with calligraphy, hand knitting, and similar crafts, this tends to shift the area of commercial viability away from doing the work in question and towards books, supplies, workshops, instructional videos, etc.)

Of course, that does not sum up every budding photographer. There are plenty of photographers who are deeply embedded in the art world (which has largely swallowed up serious photography), and photojournalism is not dead. And I would not suggest that art photography and photojournalism are not worthwhile pursuits.

But is there a photographic equivalent of a novel, at this point, or of a short story? (Equivalent in use I mean, not in structure, like the “literary” photographs of Frank Gohlke.) Is there photography which is produced for and consumed by the general public, for the joy of it?

That is more questionable.

Certainly there are people who are making photography that I would consider to be suitable for this role; there is good photography that exists outside the art niche and apart from the perversely utilitarian industries of prettiness on demand, and also apart from the civic-minded function of photojournalism and documentary photography.

But what is happening to that photography after it is made? Some percentage of it is published in various forms, and some percentage of what is published is bought (if applicable) and viewed, but the extent to which that happens outside the art community or the community of people who identify as photographers is more questionable.

And that — well, that worries me a great deal.

Last night, Frank Gohlke gave a lecture in San Francisco, and I quite nearly missed it, since it wasn’t mentioned in any of the local events lists I (barely) follow — fortunately, I saw it in a post on Mary Virginia Swanson’s blog the day before. I would have been seriously annoyed at myself if I’d missed it.

Most of the lecture actually consisted of readings from Thoughts On Landscape, so I won’t attempt to reproduce any of it here. (Especially since I’ve quoted it extensively here, on my tumblr, and on 1/125.) I’ll just say that if you are even slightly interested in photography, and you have read Thoughts On Landscape, you need to get on that, prompt-like.

Afterward, there was a question and answer period, and I did take some notes for that. I tried to be as accurate as possible, but I’m not much of a stenographer, so please forgive me if some of this is imperfectly recorded. I’m also not going to elaborate or provide much in the way of interpretation or response, since I just want to get this posted, for the moment:

On choosing where to go when making a trip, Gohlke said that he always avoids going to places that qualify as “destinations,” saying, “Too much is decided for you in destinations; what can you do but affirm it?”

Describing his feelings about photography after he first turned to it as an alternative to his graduate studies in English, Gohlke said, “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever done. I never want to do anything else. Why didn’t anyone tell me.”

Gohlke also talked about how one can explain what it is to photograph, especially with regard to relating the photographer’s work to the painter’s work, and whether or not one “just takes takes pictures”:

You don’t just take photographs. You live, and you photograph. And the closer those things come to being the same, the better, and the better you’ll work.

He expanded on this by pointing out that much of the work of photography is done without a camera — that it is about everything else the photographer experiences, and digests, and can then bring to the practice of photography.

Maybe my favorite part of the evening was an exchange in which Gohlke said that he makes “literary photographs,” and someone in the audience asked, “Why literary,” to which Gohlke replied, “Because they require reading.”

Gohlke also talked about the importance — both in writing and in photography — of not caring about how people will perceive your work, and how this is something that tends to get easier with age. (Which is heartening.)