I Can See it For You Wholesale

I had a minor epiphany the other day about a certain source of unease I feel regarding photography.

The epiphany happened while I was mulling over the subject of video games and their relationship to art. I was listening to the Joystiq Podcast episode in which Ludwig Kietzmann talks about Bulletstorm. I forget his phrasing on the podcast, but here’s what he wrote in his preview:

Writing about games always comes with a peculiar kind of self-defeating dissonance. This morning, I might have grabbed a metaphorical megaphone and shoved it in some ebert’s ear, right before laying out why Shadow of the Colossus is such a magnificent meditation on loss and sacrifice and etc. “Games involve and encourage and inspire!” I’d say. “It’s for grownups, you know.”

And then, just a few hours later, I’ll write about a game that’s awesome because it lets you kick people to death.

This made something click for me: I really like video games — despite not being all that good at them, and despite not playing them all that much. But maybe even more than playing them, I like reading and listening to people share what they think and feel about video games. I like the intellectual culture surrounding gaming.

I also like TV. I like TV a lot. I think about TV a lot, and I talk about it, and good television is quite possibly my favorite sort of media to experience. And I take the idea of good television extremely seriously.

I don’t particularly like movies. I mean, some movies are excellent. But I find that, by and large, I am nowhere near as excited by a good movie as I am by a good television show. Even more so with theater. I feel out of place as a member of those audiences.

And when it comes to fiction writing, I am strongly biased towards genre work.

All this, plus my enjoyment of photography — and, specifically, the aspects of the photographic world which make me uncomfortable — point to a very strong, fundamental bias on my part: I prefer media that have not gained acceptance as art and, in general, legitimation.

I like stuff happening in cultural contexts where the “high” and “low” have not yet differentiated themselves into mutually exclusive markets, where the best and worst work sit side-by-side on the shelves or the walls — and where conversations about quality, taste, and worth cannot be shut down by simply pointing to the segregation of high and low markets. These are contexts which have a more democratic flavor to them, and a more diverse one — and as such, I feel more at home in them.

These are also, significantly, the contexts in which separate scales of value have not yet been created for audiences of different socioeconomic class.

This is perhaps why I’m generally drawn to photography that took place in the time prior to the ’80′s (that is, amusingly, prior to my birth), when the longtime dream of creating legitimacy for photography as an art form was more or less accomplished. And also why I’m uncomfortable with both the world of contemporary art photography and the world of contemporary commercial photography — and the communities of wannabes that orient toward either of those worlds.

I’m not sure whether that should make me optimistic or pessimistic about the future. In general, that gap gets wider as time goes on — look at theater, which is basically either highly rarefied or is Cats, and look at cinema, where it feels like more and more, every movie can be classified either as indy or blockbuster.

However, it seems like the lines in photography are getting somewhat more blurred recently — or, rather, that the contexts which are defined by those lines are overlapping more and more. I don’t think this is necessarily making photography a more democratic and diverse place than it was in the 90′s, say, but I do think it makes the direction of the medium more uncertain, and maybe more open to redirection…which is maybe enough cause for a bit of optimism. God, I certainly hope so…

I noticed something recently while reading a post on La Pura Vida. A photographer began by saying, “before I can talk about my photography it’s important to share my history,” and then proceeded to say something which I’ve read (with some variations) many times before:

I was given a small kodak instant camera as a kid. I used it for the single purpose of taking back memories to my parents when I was away from home, to share with them what I had lived. I couldn’t bare the idea of them being absent and not experiencing what I was seeing. I was obsessed with the – “Look what I saw!”

via Featured – Alex Cretey | la pura vida

I find a lot of interviews with photographers and essays by photographers start with something like this — a disclosure of childhood experiences that flowered into photographic obsession.

For photographers, origin stories often start at a very early age.

I don’t have anything of the sort — I had zero interest in photography as a kid, aside from occasionally envying any gadget that had so many controls on it. A good thing, too, since I could never have afforded film for a camera back then. I was — and remained until quite recently — a fundamentally word-based person, with virtually no interest in art of any kid, just the written and the spoken word.

I got my first camera for an entirely pedestrian purpose (I wanted to be able to photograph my knitting). Inevitably, like every other asshole with a camera, I started using it to make flower macros and shit, too, just because I could. Some of that stuff is probably still lingering in my flickr account.

But I think the shift toward thinking of the camera as something more came when I realized that the camera could see things more clearly than I could.

This was not a metaphysical realization, mind you — my eyesight had become pretty bad for distant subjects, and because I don’t drive, it was a long time before I was forced to do something about it and actually get glasses. This was around the same time I started using the camera out in the world, but there was still a window of a few weeks or months in which my clearest view of the world was on the back of a crappy LCD.

When I would see something that — despite its fuzziness — I thought might be interesting, I would photograph it simply for the purpose of being able to inspect the details I could not otherwise perceive.

At that point, the camera was acting for me as a kind of mild prosthetic. It was an extension of my eyes, a tool for seeing. Since then, while I’ve gone much deeper into the medium, I don’t think I’ve strayed too far from that initial, banal relationship with cameras; I still basically see the practice of photography as an act of perception, although as time passes (and I got glasses), that has been more and more in the phenomenological sense and less and less in the optical sense.

This probably has a lot to do with my distrust of “creative” photography and many flavors of conceptually-oriented photography…

In the process of writing this short post for 1/125 I did a quick self-google to verify my suspicion that I had already posted about this same interview.

As it turns out, I did, but on an old, now-defunct personal blog that I had mostly forgotten about. I won’t shame myself by linking to it here. I only mention it at all, because I notice that I was already thinking, in 2007, about the problem of creativity in photography, and my intuitions then are pretty congruent with my conclusions now — which is interesting, because on a whole lot of photography-related topics, me in 2007 was a completely different person from me in 2010.

I don’t think of photography as a creative art (I don’t generally stage pictures or engineer situations for taking them), but more as an analytic craft, like non-fiction writing; it is more a matter of peeling away what does not belong than of putting in what does…. I’m probably being influenced right now by some of the thinking I’ve been doing about photography and non-fiction writing. Excluding the form of photography where you build stuff just to take pictures of it, neither is a “creative art” in the sense of causing or even pretending to cause something “new” to be. The point is not to create the newest thing but to make as clear as possible (not necessarily as accurate; that’s another, more loaded issue) a description of something that already exists.

In fact, I might go so far as to say this perception/determination regarding the non-creative nature of photography may be the closest thing to a unifying theme (Minor White’s “thin red line” — no, because it is not unique to me) that extends from almost the beginning of when I started to use a camera with intent to the present.