Method and Process II

I offer herein further hasty remarks to clarify yesterday's hasty remarks.

John Berger wrote a well known essay about the process of drawing. It seems to appear in every essay collection, and as a consequence I own probably at least three copies of it, perhaps more. In it, he expounds a version of his notion of what Art is about, how it made (and, as a consequence, how it is consumed.) Berger considers Art to be a process of discovery, the act of making Art is a series of discoveries about the subject, the artist, their relationship, whatever. Anything but the Art Object itself.

In drawing, Berger says, you discover things about the subject and represent them with lines. At some point, a drawing reaches a crisis point, a point at which the process of drawing pivots from setting down discoveries about the subject to setting down things according to the needs of the drawing itself. The drawing, in my paraphrase, begins to be about itself rather than about the subject.

It seems to me that much of "serious photography" begins more or less at the crisis. The photographer observes something in the world, records it with the camera, and from that point forward for the Serious Photographer the process largely ignores the subject, and indeed everything except the photograph itself.

Even Adams who banged on endlessly about things that get used constantly by Serious Photographers never let up on his belief that all work done on the picture had to be referred back to the subject, and the photographer's relationship with the subject. To express that was specifically, explicitly, the point of all manipulation.

This has, largely, been lost. Most modern serious photographs are about themselves, and that is what makes them uninteresting. That is why we've seen them all.

This, in contrast to vernacular photography, which is always and entirely about the subject.

Consider also that the only people who look at a photograph and consider the photograph itself as a thing are themselves photographers. Normal people look at the subject. So, when some Serious Goob "makes" a photograph, they've created an object that is about itself, about something that normies won't even see. They'll see the subject which, in a meaningful way, is something the photographer doesn't even care about. The subject is just there to be depicted by the photograph, and the normies can kinda tell.

Now, to be fair, art that is about itself is pretty normal these days. Berger was always a bit of a weirdo, and while today everyone pretends to hold him up as a standard, most of even those people haven't the foggiest idea what he said and would violently disagree with it if they knew. Berger is a source of little quotable bits, not of actual ideas, these days.

From where I sit a synthesis of the vernacular's subject-forwardness with an artistic grasp of formal properties is if not the only way to take photos, certainly an excellent one.

Compare any of the Big Names from the 20th century with the output of the average MFA student, or Street Photographer or Serious Amateur or whatever and you will, I think, see how the former tended more toward revealing discoveries about the subject, and the latter are largely making pictures which are about themselves.

I like the first ones better.

Don't over-work your photos, man.