On Choosing

AD Coleman firmly holds the opinion that a photographer, as an artist, must choose their photos. To simply shoot a bunch of pictures is not enough. To him, Vivian Maier essentially does not exist as a photographer. This is a position with which I concur, and which I have argued for at some length over the years. Photography is choosing.

You choose where to stand, where to point the lens, when to press the shutter. You choose frames at the contact sheet. You choose final prints and arrangements. Unless you proceed through to the end, the job is not done.

You can shoot 100,000 frames and choose 12. You can shoot 12 frames and choose 12.

But you must choose.

Colberg has a piece up arguing against projects. You have to subscribe to a thing to read the whole thing, so I don't really know or care where he goes from the part I've linked to. The thrust seems to be that "the project" is a straitjacket in a bunch of ways, some harmful. On the one hand this is obviously true.

On the other hand, you have to choose. In order to choose, you need some sort of rubric, it is the essence of choosing. If a rubric doesn't in some sense constitute a project, I don't even know what any of those words mean.

In the olden days, before say 1990, you'd just choose the bangers. "Chicago, 1968-1978" you dig out the contact sheets from that decade, sort out the ones from Chicago, and circle all the bangers. Pick the best 20 of those in terms of technical details, and you're done. There's your show.

And then we moved on, that got played out and while there are still people trying it on just like that nobody much cares unless it's a Big Name retrospective.

The rubrics for choosing have gotten more complex. We demand some sort of connections, some sort of theme, some sort of meaning in the collective pile of final pictures.

Again, I don't care when you choose. Shooting-to-order is just choosing early. Digging through your midden of contact sheets is choosing later. It doesn't matter.

If Colberg's eventual point is that your project has to be kind of fluid, then I have no argument with him. It's stupid to pin down a hyper-specific rubric too early (although, to be fair, limitations can stimulate creativity.) Let the rubric float a bit, and you'll be a lot happier in the end. Colberg also seems to suggest that photos shouldn't be constrained to a single project, which, again, I agree with. This is just allowing a photo to fit more than one rubric.

On the one hand, homeboy is clearly drawing on his experience teaching idiots in MFA programs, but on the other hand, who the hell cares what corners idiots paint themselves into? An idiot can paint themselves into a corner with any set of tools whatsoever, so the fact that they're crying in a corner might not be evidence that the tools you've given them are bad.

Figuring out a rubric for a body of work isn't easy. Lots and lots and lots of photographers cannot do it at all. The Goldsmiths vanity MA seems to produce a steady stream of people who haven't the foggiest notion, because it is run by a guy who hasn't the foggiest notion. There are loads of people who take pictures for money (where the rubric for choosing is supplied in the form of what we normally call "a brief") who are completely helpless when confronted with doing it for themselves. They take a bunch of pictures on some theme, and throw out the blurry ones. The pile of sharp and in-theme photos grows without limit, but no meaning ever emerges, and it's not clear that the photographer even knows what that might look like or that it would be desirable. They helplessly watch the pile grow until they tire of the theme, and move on to a new theme. Rinse and repeat.

Most people who take photographs never even bother. They hold up their phone and tap the button. They make one choice once, and that's the end of it. They post the photo somewhere, or show it to their friends, or whatever. I do this! I take photos to send to people: "is this your ring?" "are these the right makeup wipes?" "look at what my dumb dog is doing!"

These things are not "art photography" though, they're something else. None of these people is making any kind of statement. There's nothing to say except the immediate content of this photo, right here, right now.

To be honest, I remain completely stymied in my own "practice."

I know (in some sense) that it's not just bullshit, because I see things in which someone chose some pictures and meaning emerged. I see things that I made in which this happened. At the same time, I struggle with the idea that maybe it is all bullshit, that the rubrics are essentially arbitrary, and that the so-called meaning is just pareidolia. My answer, though, has been to stop taking pictures. I am not going to go and shoot on some random theme and hope that something emerges, because I know that ends with a midden of pointless photos.

It's possible I am coming to that point that Cartier-Bresson arrived at. When you draw something you know you've definitely made something. It might be shitty, it might be bad, but god damn if you didn't actually make a thing that has your fingerprints on it.

To abandon the idea of the rubric is to abandon the entire enterprise beyond the "look at what my dumb dog is up to" project. If choosing is bullshit, then photography as an artistic venture is bullshit. I don't see any way to save it.

I dunno man.

Travel Photography

Yo.

I'm back for at least one post because I had some thoughts. Sometimes that leads to more thoughts, which is really the problem with thoughts, isn't it?

My family and I went on a trip, to London for a week and Paris for a week, and it was pretty great as you'd expect, and so on and so forth. I had some thoughts about the nature of Travel for Travel's sake, and photography, and so here we are. I tried to contact everyone on the flight path to see if there was a chance to visit, but I probably forgot some of you. Sorry.

Onwards.

I distinguish here between Travel for Travel's sake and all the other reasons to go to places. One travels for work, for business, to visit people, and so on. Here I am interested in Vacation Travel, the kind of travelling one does in order purely to be in a different place.

I contend that underlying, or entangled with, this kind of travel is a sort of hope or expectation of personal growth. Vague, indefinable, growth: we hope to return from our trip in some way enlarged, perhaps a better person, or a wiser person, or something. We go to Egypt, and as a requirement of the journey we look at the Pyramids and the Sphinx, and in that looking we expect or hope to find some sort of epiphany, some sort of catalyst, some sort of chemical reaction that changes us into something more than we were. This is, I think, an error. I'm not sure where this idea came from, but I think it's a real idea, and I think it's a wrong idea.

That sort of indefinable en-biggening can in fact occur on a Vacation! We do expand, if we pay attention. But it's not at the Tourist Attractions and it's mostly not at the Large Objects or the Expensive Objects or the Beautiful Objects.

When we go to somewhere far away, or even to somewhere not very far away at all, we have the chance to observe new ways of livings ones life.

In our VRBOs in Europe we had laundry facilities in the apartments, which was very nice. These facilities took the form of tiny combined washer-dryer units. The surprising property of these things, to me, was that it takes literally all day to clean and "dry" clothing, and then you have a heap of fairly damp clothing which you festoon all over the place to finish drying. To describe this as "a bit different from the American way" is to severely understate the situation. If I use the "hurry up" cycles, I can produce a small load of clean and bone-dry clothing in an hour, at home.

The consequence here is that you need to plan differently. You should start laundry in, say, the morning. When you get home, you take the damp clothing out and festoon it about, and at bedtime you fold it and put it away. It's not a big thing when you get the hang of it. It's a tiny difference in the rhythm of life. This is where the epiphanies, in my judgement, occur.

When you go to Paris for a week (or go to visit your relatives one town over, or go to Eritrea to fight with or against the rebels) you experience a life with a texture different from the life you live at home. You will, more or less by necessity, adapt to the new rhythms, the differences subtle and vast between this life and that one. You become larger. You return home with a slightly wider understanding of how one might live one's life.

It seems foolish to assert that the washing machine affected me more than the Eiffel Tower, but I think it genuinely did.

And now onwards to some sort of connection with the photo and with photography.

Susan Sontag famously made some remarks about vacation photos. She describes them, I think, as acquistions, the act of photographing the Sphinx is an effort to acquire the Sphinx. This is pretty silly, but in some sense she was on to something.

I think what we're doing when we photograph the Sphinx is that we're acquiring the experience of looking at the Sphinx. We were hoping for an epiphany, which may or may not have manifested itself. By photographing it, we acquire a photograph, a little portal back to that original experience of seeing the Sphinx. Unconsciously, perhaps, we hope to "return" to this moment, to rediscover, or perhaps to cast about fruitlessly again for, the epiphany we wanted. We hope also to share this moment with friends and family, to either lord our own growth over them, or perhaps to share that experience, that growth, with them.

In all (most? many?) cases, though, I think that there is no growth, no epiphany, the photograph in the end is no different from the postcard (which has a sharper and better lit photograph anyway), and the Sphinx didn't make us much different in the first place. The things that did make us bigger and better are impossible to photograph being nothing more than the textural details of life in this place.

Berger's "Ways of Seeing" opens with a great bit in which he demolishes Walter Benjamin by demonstrating that there is not, there cannot be, any special "aura" associated with an original artwork. Any "aura" you feel is an illusion produced by you, inside yourself. In the same way, the Sphinx has no "aura" and the Eiffel Tower does not have within itself the power to change you. You might, perhaps, choose to be changed in its presense, somehow, but the objects are just sitting there. The textural detail of life, on the other hand, has an almost mechanical action on your mind. You are forced to adapt to the washing machine if you want clean underwear, you are forced to cope with the almost-instant-on hot water heater every time you shower, and if you want to eat, you're going to have to sort through the subtle differences in how to get food here.

Of course I took a bunch of photos, and I drew some pictures, but none of them are connected to that desire to be enlarged, they're just records of stuff we saw. In the end I just sort of sift through them, unsure what to make of it all. It's a process.

I did see this young and beautiful woman in the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris. Note the, uh, wear patterns. After a moment's consideration, I elected not to contribute, but I did take the picture.

I'm Not Dead

Really, I am not dead.

I just can't think of anything to say about photography. Drawing has kind of eaten my brain lately, but I am utterly unqualified to talk about Drawing, really. Maybe some day. I draw a lot. Every day. I am substantially less bad at drawing than I was a year ago, but I'm not good as such, and I certainly have no expertise or theory.

It's always tempting to just pivot to a this-is-my-life blog, but for whatever reason I am loathe to do that. Lots of people do, and that's fine, but I just don't feel it for this blog here and now.

To an extent this is a knock on effect of the workshop/retreat I did with Jonathan Blaustein a year or so ago. I came away from that with a serious plan to do serious work, a sort of "stop screwing around and get down to business" situation, and it turns out that I'm not quite ready to do that. Or I don't have the time. Or the energy. Or something. Maybe I simply haven't got the stuff for anything except screwing around.

Anyway, it was time to fish, or cut bait, and apparently I am doing whichever of those doesn't include doing a lot of photography or writing about photography.

Consider me on indefinite hiatus, I guess. Sometimes saying "I am on hiatus" stirs the pot, so it's 50:50 I'll be back in short order with 20,000 words, each more unhinged than the last, but I make no promises.

I do plan to actually get back to doing photography at some point, to doing that serious project, but it's just a hypothetical for now. Don't take me seriously until I actually deliver some fucking pictures.