I Can See it For You Wholesale

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.)

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…