Mindfulness

This is actually a precursor to a somewhat longer essay I'm working on, which should position me properly as a laughingstock.

Here we have Robert Frank's application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, which ultimately led to The Americans:

I am applying for a Fellowship with a very simple intention: I wish to continue, develop and widen the kind of work I already do, and have been doing for some ten years, and apply it to the American nation in general. I am submitting work that will be seen to be documentation—most broadly speaking. Work of this kind is, I believe, to be found carrying its own visual impact without much work explanation. The project I have in mind is one that will shape itself as it proceeds, and is essentially elastic. The material is there: the practice will be in the photographer’s hand, the vision in his mind. One says this with some embarrassment but one cannot do less than claim vision if one is to ask for consideration.

“The photographing of America” is a large order—read at all literally, the phrase would be an absurdity. What I have in mind, then, is observation and record of what one naturalized American finds to see in the United States that signifies the kind of civilization born here and spreading elsewhere. Incidentally, it is fair to assume that when an observant American travels abroad his eye will see freshly; and that the reverse may be true when a European eye looks at the United States. I speak of the things that are there, anywhere and everywhere—easily found, not easily selected and interpreted. A small catalog comes to the mind’s eye: a town at night, a parking lot, a supermarket, a highway, the man who owns three cars and the man who owns none, the farmer and his children, a new house and a warped clapboard house, the dictation of taste, the dream of grandeur, advertising, neon lights, the faces of the leaders and the faces of the followers, gas tanks and postoffices and backyards.

The uses of my project would be sociological, historical and aesthetic. My total production will be voluminous, as is usually the case when the photographer works with miniature film. I intend to classify and annotate my work on the spot, as I proceed. Ultimately the file I shall make should be deposited in a collection such as the one in the Library of Congress. A more immediate use I have in mind is both book and magazine publication.

At any rate, I found this on the web, and the most likely thing is that it was copied from some reliable source more or less accurately.

Here we see that Frank had a project in mind, he had an idea, a vision. Yep, pretty broad and squishy, and he admits right up front that it's gonna evolve and change as the project proceeds. And, I suppose it did. There certainly seems to be more in the book than the proposal talks of. And, we see the results which are, as noted, a sharp blow to the head.

A commenter on my previous post noted that Frank took 28,000-odd photos to make the book. Were he shooting randomly, my rough estimates are that he'd have gotten about 30-50 "good ones" in the sense of a good competition-worthy single frame. Of note is that the book contains a lot of things that would die in competition. No ribbons for Frank. Be that as it may, it's clear, to this viewer, that Frank was seeing issues of race, issues of class, political, social, economic issues. I do not think that he would have spotted and documented these things, these things in their essentially American versions, without approaching it with a plan.

I don't know how well one would do shooting "issues of race" if you just waved the camera around, clicking away. I do know "competition ready" comes out somewhere around 1:1000, so my best guess is that excellent social insight frames might clock in around the same? That's just a guess. Anyways, to assume that he was able to just shoot "stuff" the way an enthusiast does, is to assume about a 1:338 ratio. Which strikes me as awfully high. In truth, I believe that shooting in this way produces a 0:infinity ratio of the precisely stated observations that appear in The Americans. Not every frame in the book is impossible, but there are some doozies in there which simply could not be done without being mindful in the way I mean.

In short, I assert that he was mindful in his work, he had a plan, an idea, a theme, and he held it in his mind as he shot. I contend that there's no other way the book could have happened.

Contrast this much of HCB's best work. He too was mindful, I think, but in a deeply different way. He strove to be connected with the moment, and he worked the scene, the situation, the moment (his contact sheets bear this out) searching for the right moment. From time to time, he found it. But, he seems in those days not to have had a larger plan, his goal was the individual frame perfectly summarizing the gestalt within the frame.

HCB's work, to be blunt, would be terrible and uninteresting except for his total mastery of the frame. The "decisive moment" photos are each individually very very good. Taken all together, they are exactly the sum of their parts, no more, and no less. Frank's work, taken frame by frame, is somewhere between banal and puzzling, with occasional "hey, that's good", but taken together they are vastly greater than the sum of the parts. The Americans is not a collection of puzzling frames with a lot of stuff out of focus, with an occasional pretty good one. Those are its parts, certainly, but the book is far more.

Frank and HCB were both mindful in their own radically different ways. Frank's way is more reproducible (HCB, honestly, appears to have been sui generis, nobody else really seems to be able to do that thing), and reflects the way plenty of artists work.

The vast majority of enthusiasts are, at best, striving to be mindful in the way HCB was, striving to master this individual frame and the elements within it. Since they're not HCB, the results are typically somewhere between awful and OK. In no cases will the portfolio ever add up to more than the simple sum. At any rate, I have never seen a body of work which simultaneously seems to be much more than its parts, and which I know to have had the theme/idea imposed after shooting.

Frank's way also aligns with the way good professional photography is done. The creative brief defines the theme, the idea. The photographer works the theme, the idea, and attempts to make pictures that reflect it.

I might or might not be able to shoot your TiG welders to look efficient, reliable, but it would take me three visits and a week, at least, and it's even odds I couldn't do it at all. Kirk Tuck can roll in of an afternoon and do it, time after time. That's why he gets paid to shoot, and I don't.