I Can See it For You Wholesale

I’m working on an actual post with, you know, words and stuff. But in the mean time, let me throw some photographs at your from last week, when I went to see the Avedon exhibit.

I find it hard not to photograph photographers. I don’t know whether it’s some stupid “meta” thing or whether people just tend to look hilarious and endearing when they’re looking at the back of a camera and trying to figure out why their pictures are backlit.

I don’t mean to dismiss snapshots or point and shoots, mind you. The photographer here, for example, at the SFMOMA rooftop garden, was assiduous about exploring changes in camera position and angle, and had no qualms about kneeling on the ground to get a shot. Better a P&S and a sense of perspective than a pricey camera and no notion of composition…

By the way, do click through and look at the large images. In fact, that applies to all of these — I’ve been finding, as I shoot more street photography, that I’m using broader compositions, including more context, and as a result I’m getting photographs which don’t really lend themselves to being viewed as flickr medium images the way my close-up work and bird photography usually do. : )

The rooftop garden is a nice place to photograph, although quite small. A lot of people take pictures there, I think perhaps because they’re getting it out of their system, after spending time in the exhibits were photography is often forbidden. It’s interesting to see the range of reactions people have to art generally, and to the art that’s currently in the rooftop garden in particular — it’s sculpture there, and modern sculpture tends to be more inscrutable than other art forms, I think.

Some folks seem to have a genuine aesthetic appreciation for the stuff, either naive (simple joy in the thing itself) or informed (intellectual pleasure based on an understanding of the work’s place in the history of art). For the record, I have neither for most of them…

There are other folks who are manifestly trying to pretend that they understand or care about what they’re seeing, and others still who are perfectly up front about not caring, having been dragged there by their parents or their kids or their significant others. I sympathize with them. There are folks — more admirable, I admit — who greet art with a mixture of curiosity and indignation, and who very much want an explanation for what they are being asked to look at.

I can’t say for certainty into which category this gentleman falls, but I suspect it is the last, and probably the best, category. Me, I fall into the category who is more likely to dismiss the art and scrutinize the viewers, which makes me the douchebag in this tableau.

Went to see the Avedon exhibition last week. I’ve been thinking about it off and on since then, and I’m still not entirely sure where I stand on the work I saw there.

Technically, he succeeds perfectly within the narrow range of techniques he employs — a bit like Atget, in that respect, a sort of single-minded thoroughness in taking those few techniques to their very limit. And I can’t really fault him as an artist, either — he obviously succeeds perfectly well in achieving his vision.

I just, well, don’t fucking like it. (Note: I’m not saying it’s bad.) I find it disturbing and off-putting. And also beautiful and sometimes very moving. And I haven’t really pinned down the source of that disturbance for me, but here’s my best guess at the moment:

Avedon is basically taking people and turning them into gods, or monsters, or monstrous gods. (Part of what I feel when I look at them is almost Lovecraftian, a mingled awe-disgust-fear.)

Why should this disturb me so? The deification of celebrities is nothing new, and should at worst be a matter of banality. The deification of ordinary people (which Avedon executes with the exact same techniques) should be a reversal of the hierarchy, and as such should appeal to the kind of simplistic leftism that is bred in my bones. But it does not.

I think it is something about the deification itself, regardless of subject, which is the source of the wrongness.

Avedon’s process is not like that of, say, Minor White, who can see in the flesh of a person an equivalent, a symbolic link to the numinous. There is nothing spiritual about what Avedon is doing. Avedon is crafting a totem or fetish out of the person. He is converting them into an idol.

This is a rather intense form of objectification — and when I say objectification, I am thinking of what Simone Weil said in her essay on The Iliad, about objectification as a form of violence or force. (Of which the most literal and extreme sort is death — that which transforms a human being completely and finally into a mere thing, that is, a corpse.)

In writing this, something suddenly clicked for me about Avedon’s photography. (God help me, I actually said, “Aha!”)

What clicked had to do with what I was supposed to be seeing in this exhibition. The curators and the reviewer in the Chronicle both placed great stress on the role of motion in Avedon’s photography, and both when I was looking at them in person, and as I mulled them over after the fact, this admonition (to see motion, to see these photographs as being about motion) persistently rang false to me. Or, rather, it rang half-true, and now I see why.

It is not motion which is present in these photographs, but…the false, the unfulfillable promise of motion, as if the subject were threatening (impotently, of course) at any moment to come to life.

This false promise is normally denoted by the term “lifelike,” and it is properly the province not of the photographer, but of the taxidermist…

So, I went back to see the Frank and Adams-O’keefe exhibitions again. By which I mean, I went back to see Pepper No. 30 again. (I took my sister, and we also went to the farmer’s market and were otherwise productive.) Obviously these were the same exhibitions, so I don’t have any fundamentally new material…although I’m feeling more definite about my sense that there’s something off about Frank’s photographs of black people.

For example, compare the photographs he made of a Spanish funeral to those he made of a black funeral in the American south, and think about his position in those situations. In the Spanish photographs, he’s at a distance that seems appropriate; at the black funeral, he appears to have no qualms about invading personal space, as my sister put it. Which says a lot about how he felt about those people. Reminds me somewhat of a recent thread on flickr which touched on how a lot of photographers seem to have no problem photographing homeless people when they would think twice about photographing others. It seems to have something to do with different perceptions of people’s reality as human beings.

The captions, as usual, don’t help at all. There’s a photograph (google it) of a black nurse holding a white baby, and the baby is described in the caption as looking determined, which is accurate, but the nurse is described as appearing stoic, when in fact, her main expression is actually a small smile. I don’t know whether this suggests that the captioner has a problem “reading” black faces, or whether the difficulty is that he or she presumed the nurse must be a stoic person, (and in all likelihood she was a stoic person), and stopped there, before looking to see if the actual woman as photographed matched this expectation? Whatever the case, there was a distinct failure to see.

Which is pretty significant when you consider that the person who captioned that photograph is responsible for helping thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in at least three cities understand what that photograph means.