Witnessing vs. Representation

A more or less interesting conversation going on over at Leicaphilia in the comments. I made some powerful and erudite contribution which at this exact moment awaits moderation. By the time you read this, though, it is likely that it will be moderated through, no doubt sparking a witty and insightful conversation. Or, you know, maybe not.

Anyways, the thrust of my insightful comment was this:

The photograph testifies, more than anything else, that something was. This is the only intelligent observation in Barthes' Camera Lucida and while it sounds a bit blockheaded, it is nonetheless a critical point that deserves repetition. This is a truth, albeit a simple one. It is important, worthwhile, and often lost-track-of, specifically because this exists in contrast to, perhaps even in constant struggle with, another truth:

Photographs represent what was there. Here, the idea of representation is a term of art, roughly aligned with this dictionary definition:

The description or portrayal of someone or something in a particular way or as being of a certain nature.

You might consider representation to be commenting on what was rather than merely testifying to its existence. Indeed, a representation need not testify to the reality of something at all. A painting might comment on the nature of a thing, or a category of things, without in fact showing us a real one of the things. A painting might represent a monarch as, I don't know, let us say evil, without being a picture of an actual monarch.

These two realities of what a photo is happen also to line up with two competing philosophies, neither of which would likely be delighted with this characterization. While Barthes more or less denies the power of a photograph to represent, most of his acolytes ignore the possibility that a photograph can do anything else. When pressed, they would likely admit that the photograph can witness, can testify, but they would deny that this is important.

I think coherent argument can be made that the early Art photographers, through the Pictorialists, were struggling to push their photographs to represent, to do more than to merely bear witness. This is, after all, the standard argument against photographs as Serious Art — they can only witness. Later, many of the Modernists used other technical means to attempt the same goals. Get in close, abstract the shapes, drill in to details, select unusual vantage points, and so on, all to try to force a "straight" photograph to reveal something more than merely a copy of what was in front of the lens. Forcing a straight photograph to represent coherently and clearly is, frankly, a struggle. It "wants" merely to witness.

At the same time, photojournalists and early documentarians were doing precisely the opposite, striving to simply record and witness as distinctly as possible. Recording architectural and cultural wonders for the all-consuming eye, and all that business. This group generally believed that their work only witnessed, it did not represent.

At some point there was a shift. Duchamp's "Fountain" is many things, including a stick to the eye of Fine Art, but also a statement: witnessing can be Art. There's nothing there, it's just a urinal, it simply sits there, be-ing. And yet, it is Art.

And thus is dismissed entirely the question of how a photograph, which some say merely witnesses, can be Art. It can be Art, whether it witnesses, whether it represents, or both. But not just any shitty photograph, it turns out, however much it witnesses whatever-the-hell.

To a degree this is the world we have arrived at. Much of photographic Serious Art styles itself precisely this way, as documentary photography (witnessing) with a message, an opinion, with politics (representation). Done well, this can be truly fantastic stuff.

The trouble, as I see it, with much of Serious Documentary Art, is that because theory states that all photographs represent the photographers don't even try. They just snap a photo of whatever, and figure that since theory says so, it probably represents something. There is a failure to acknowledge that a straight photograph does not particularly "want" to represent, the default setting as it were is to witness. Because the artist feels so strongly, surely the photograph must represent? All too often, it's just a snap of a microfilm can, witnessing only that the photographer knows where a library can be found.

On the other side of things, the Serious Decor people, seem to think that merely witnessing is the point. They take some loving, overwrought, picture of a landscape or a flower or a water droplet and they process it into oblivion, and they figure that since they put all this technical work into it, it's probably Art by now. They have no philosophy, no notion of representation at all. Their photographs, no matter how many layers they put into their Photoshop file, never do anything more than witness that there was a rock, a flower, a bug. These people too are trapped by the default witness-only character of the photograph, but unlike their MFA-holding compadres, they think this is a good thing.

Now, to be fair, Duchamp can get away with just chucking a urinal out there, and lo, it is Art. You, as a maker of overwrought pictures of bugs, probably can't.

Art is embedded in culture both as result and substrate. Duchamp's stature, and his ideas, allowed him to shove his damned urinal in there. You are, most likely, nobody, so you'd jolly well better have some ideas and, to be honest, your ideas probably ought to be visible. If not in the pictures, at least in the artist's statement. You don't get to be substrate upon which culture stands by cranking the sliders in Lightroom over to 11. At least, not unless you're Duchamp.

Nor, it turns out, do you get to be substrate upon which culture is built if your pictures are bullshit pictures of nothing, witnessing nothing much, but (according to you) representing the shit out of... something nobody can quite put their finger on.

This witnesses the existence of, the life and work of, one Dr. Ceriani. It also comments on that existence. It is not a bullshit picture of nothing. It is not an overwrought picture of nothing. It strikes a balance.

Country Doctor: Gene Smith

The Opposing Commentator

I promised you, a little while ago, some discussion of a commentator who took the opposite tack. Colin Pantall is writing a series of essays on ethics in photography in which he considers photographs almost completely in terms of the politics of their making, and almost not at all on their own merits, on the contents of the frame.

Colin is some sort of a British academic, but I find my own ideas and conceits echoed in his writing fairly often. You may deduce from this that he is intelligent, erudite, and devilishly handsome. The essay series I'm talking about here is a year-long project, started in January, for World Press Photo's Witness thing, which I guess is something like an electronic magazine. He's got 7 essays up now, plus an intro, which works out to about 1 a month, so I dare say we'll see a few more.

You can start with the intro here, and move on. There is a somewhat haphazard and often incomplete collection of links to later essays at the end of each one. With a bit of poking around you should be able to get to all of them, in sequence.

They're pretty good. As I started in on them, it fairly quickly occurred to me that he never seemed to be approaching any kind of conclusion, there's no big reveal, and so far there's no attempt at some masterful synthesis of all we have learned. Not too long after that I decided that what he was up to (so far) is not intended as a big think piece, but as a survey. A survey taken from a specific point of view, namely the methods and motivations various documentary photographic projects.

In each essay, Colin tells us about some things, usually photographic things, and he sketches the politics that drove the making of those things. Gently, he issues judgments of those methods. It feels sometimes as though he's going to go all woke and irritating on us, but happily he sticks to bigger issues like "racism is bad" which, you know, a pretty broad spectrum of us can get behind, right? His judgments tend to fall along the lines of how closely the politics of the project hew to his own (and to mine), but what he is striving for with fair success is to judge based on how full, how rounded, how humanist the methods and motivations are.

Allow me to step back and re-cast some things I've been writing about more carefully and succinctly.

When you look at a photo, you bring a bunch of baggage with you, including politics. No photo has its politics, its meaning, written in its pixels, it's just a bunch of dots. But sometimes you bring enough material to the table to read the politics of a photo easily (or at least to imagine that you do.) The things depicted in the frame may, or may not, provide markers you can use to connect the contents of the frame to your knowledge. Some frames are ciphers to all but the innest of the in-crowd, those with special knowledge. Others reveal some clues to the ordinarily knowledgeable. Some frames contain no markers whatsoever, you simply have to be told.

You don't need to know much to read some of Eddie Adams' photo of Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing Nguyen Van Lem. A few of the basic facts of the US war in Vietnam will do. You likely recognize the military garb frame-left, and recognize that this takes place in war. It is not a gangland murder. A specialist might identify which war. But, no degree of examination of the frame will reveal the names of the people in it, their ranks, or the details of the killing. These things you have to be told.

Walker Evans' photos of the Tengle family are more opaque unless you happen to be familiar with the contents of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The photos acquire new depth when, for example, you learn that James Agee disliked the Tengles. That the photographer, Evans, likes them is evident to anyone who knows a little about photography, merely by examining the frame. You might still guess poverty, rural, and maybe America based on the contents of the frame. Who the Tengles are, and how they came to be photographed, these are facts which matter, and also facts which you cannot find inside the frame.

Sally Mann's photographs of battlefields mean nothing whatsoever unless you have some notion of the US Civil War, there is literally nothing to see except a field. Even this, you need to know what a field is, what grass is, what trees are. No clues in the frame will lead one to Antietam or Cold Harbor, no matter what depth of Civil War knowledge you possess. Once that connection is made for you, though, a much unfolds with great force and speed.

Onwards.

Colin is interested in the background information. He wants to understand the politics of the photograph, in terms of its intended meaning whether that be writ in the frame, or only known outside the frame. He wants to know how and why photos were made, and by whom, and for what purpose. He wants, above all, to know the connections between the intended meanings and the ways in which the photos were made.

He judges the work based, at least for the purposes of his essays, on those exact grounds. I asked, and he was explicit: you can't see it in the pictures. Or at any rate, not always.

Of course, he is interested here in the ethics of making and using pictures, this is the entire point of his series. But still, he is willing to pass judgement in this limited but not particularly narrow domain, based entirely on the politics which surround the picture rather than the contents of the frame. The results are worth our consideration. This material is real, it is important, and we should not ignore it.

While it is not (always) visible in the pictures themselves, it surrounds the work. In order to understand the work, and to assign it meaning, we should understand something of the way the picture was made.

As with Mike Johnston's approach, I think this approach is incomplete, inadequate. It suffices for Colin's purpose here, but as complete critical apparatus, it is not enough. Probably Colin would agree, he is after all intelligent, erudite, and devilishly handsome.

One of the projects that stuck out to me, in Colin's series, is a collection of photographs stitched together from Google's freely available satellite imagery, of cattle feedlots in the USA. One need bring only common knowledge to the table to read this to a reasonable extent. Cattle are packed together in mind-bogglingly large operations. Vast lakes of.. something, one can reasonably assume cow shit, are adjacent. The whole thing looks apocalyptic to even an ordinary person, with ordinary knowledge.

Learning that these creatures are cows, and deducing that we eat the results, is uncomfortable. Whether one could work that out by examining the frame, using only common understanding, I am unsure. It's on the edge. Some people will, some won't. Perhaps you have to have some slight understanding of feedlots to work that out.

Further investigation would reveal that, bizarrely, the USA has laws prohibiting photography of such operations. It follows trivially that the artist, Mishka Henner, is working around those laws to show us what those laws conceal — a distinctly political act. At that moment the politics of the situation, again, unfold with great speed and force.

This next photograph could be a Nike Ad for all we know. It contains no markers whatever of its politics.

If not an advert, this could easily be what I termed Serious Decor, an appealing and ultimately purely formal exercise in visual construction.

It happens that it is not that at all. It is a densely coded photograph, made by Hoda Afshar, of a man, Emad, who was at that time (and may still be) residing in a refugee camp. It is as densely coded as a prince's portrait. The elements all mean something, but the meanings need to be told. You cannot deduce them from the frame.

Absent the decoder ring, it's a perfectly nice picture, even an excellent and powerful one. But it is like many others. It could be an advertisement. With the decoder ring, much unfolds, with great force and speed.

The point here, if there is one, is something like this: Art is not merely the thing itself. It is the thing and its interconnections to the world in which it finds itself. Art is a cultural construct, and as such, gathers much of its meaning from the culture in which it exists. Art, also, is a part of the culture. As such, it carries its own meaning to the culture in which it exists.

To pretend that Art exists only as itself, merely as the contents of the frame, the thing on the pedestal, the sequence of notes, is absurd.

The Failure of Straight Photography

I'm using the phrase "straight photography" fairly loosely here. What I mean is pictures that look like photographs. They might be heavily manipulated or not, but if so the manipulations are more or less convincing.

There is a lot of this stuff out there.

Much of it is extremely aesthetically pleasing. We have schlubs on 500px that nobody has ever heard of who can assemble a balanced and attractive frame. We have people who who sell large canvas wraps of beautiful flowers. We have Alain Briot and a whole category of people who operate modest galleries filled with this kind of work. We have the Caponigros and similar artists who are taken very seriously indeed, shooting this kind of thing.

There is indeed a whole branch of photography that concerns itself with this work, and considers this work to be the true work of photography (I contrast this, mostly, with the MFA Fine Art crowd who are doing, um, something different; but we should not forget the snapshootists and so on.) This is a branch of photography that considers its work to be exclusively putting subject matter into a frame in an aethetically pleasing way. They do not philosophize, they eschew any notion that they have anything to say as such. Often, they consider the idea of saying something to be effete and undesirable.

This is, I think, the legacy of, mostly, Ansel Adams. The man was a serious educator, and led the charge on any number of fetishes: archival processing, full range of tones, extreme sharpness. I suppose he didn't invent these things, but he was a very successful teacher of these ideas.

Ansel Adams, of course, was hanging around with a bunch of Modernists. As I bang on about a lot, he and his friends had strong philosophical ideas about what a picture ought to do. Weston tries to show us the essence of the pepper, Adams reveals to us his Experience Of The Rock, and so on.

The trouble is, with straight photography, this stuff doesn't really read. Yeah, I see the soul of the pepper in there, sort of, but is it only because I know what Weston was trying to do?

God help me, Barthes was right about one thing. What photographs are best at is simply witnessing: There was a pepper.

Straight photography explicitly throws away all the crutches and devices that make it easy, or perhaps possible, to say more than there was a pepper. The acolytes of Adams, which is most of us, have simply given up on anything else.

So now we have an entire genre of what is allegedly Art, which says nothing, which means nothing. It simply witnesses that a pepper, a rock, a flower, a model, was there. It is aesthetically pleasing, and that's about it. We have commentators spanning a spectrum from idiot to erudite who tell us that's pretty much all there is, and any attempt to imbue a photograph with more than that ought to be rejected. What baffles me is that roughly the same commentators bemoan that photography is not taken serious as Art.

Of course your preferred photography, sir, is not taken seriously as Art. It says nothing, it means nothing, and furthermore you insist that it continue to say nothing, and mean nothing. What on earth are we to make of this? You want me to expand my collection of this work because it is... pretty? Is this intended as some sort of jest?

What separates Weston's pepper, and I do consider it to be separated, is that we do in fact know what Weston was attempting. This knowledge affects how we (or at least I) see the picture, and I see it as more, perhaps, than it is. My point here is not that photography as a genre is limited only to witnessing that the pepper was. My point is that if you limit yourself to the frame, photography is so shackled. If you, as a photographer, consider yourself limited to putting things in to the frame, than you are also shackled. Your chosen tool has a profoundly limited range of expression.

Curiously, we continue to have a heirarchy.

500px schlub is less than Guy Tal, who is less than Paul Caponigro, who is less than Ansel Adams.

But at the end of the day, all their pictures look pretty much the same. Sure, there might be a style note that reveals that this one if Briot, and that one isn't. But both pictures are about equally appealing, about equally pretty. Both witness the same there it was fact. Neither has any meaning beyond that witnessing.

Rather to my own delight, I have dubbed this as Serious Decor. It's decor, but we are socialized to take it seriously, for some reason. Oh, it's a picture of a dandelion, yawn. Oh, wait, it's a Caponigro! Well, well, then. It's an amazing and important photograph for, um, reasons you would not understand.

Just trust me.

Art Considered Aesthetically

Mike, over on ToP, has a couple pieces in a row that are worth a looksee (the linked piece, and the one that precedes it).

In it, he laments that Art is now considered largely in terms of the politics which surround the piece. Who was the artist, which marginalized groups, if any, does the artist belong to, which unsavory billionaire funded the work, and so on. Now, he's not wrong here, this is a limited way of looking at Art, and it's fairly modern, and it often kind of ignores the actual, you know, Art. Which is all very irritating.

Let us, as usual, back up.

Art, in the Olden Dayes, often straight up told stories. There are entire genres of Art that depict a series of scenes, that literally relate some sequence of events. The painting, etching, or photograph (Rejlander's "Two Ways of Life" for example), was a literal narrative, a telling of a story. Embedded in that, as often as not, is politics. These stories are rarely about Bobby's trip to the bakery; they're founding myths, moral tales, religious tracts. They take a position, and expound it.

Later, other Art may not have taken the form of literal narratives, but it was heavily coded. The prince's sword represented one thing, his hat another, and the ring a third thing. Not everyone could read the coding, but the people who couldn't were irrelevant. The intended audience could absolutely read the painting just fine.

Maybe not all art was like this, but at any rate it was perfectly normal for a piece of art to be like this.

Mid-nineteenth century is still trundling along to a good degree as photography gets started. We see these same notions getting pulled out of the closet to be re-used in the Victorian era. See also Pictorialism.

Even as photography branched out from there, we still see a lot of what we might broadly consider politics popping up. People's dress, manner, and background continued to reveal and to comment. Lewis Hine's pictures of child labor were pretty political. Should we consider them, judge them, without consideration of the political surroundings? We could, but if we conceive of them stripped of that context, they become something quite different and something quite lesser.

Now, I don't know what Mike would have to say to those photos. Possibly he would say that the politics is encoded inside the artwork itself, and that makes it OK. He does seem to be hewing to the "Art should stand on its own" school of thought. However he would stand, the truth is that the politics are not entirely containing in the pictures. The marks are there in the frame, but they refer to the world that surrounded the making of the picture. A painting that tells the story of Genesis is meaningless if you don't know the bible. Lewis Hine's photos are meaningless if you don't know that child labor was a thing. Minamata, without its text, is a bunch of snapshots of Japanese people and one truly sublime picture of someone getting a bath.

The politics of a piece of Art do not go away simply because you know them by heart.

I suspect Mike of wanting to treat art purely from an aesthetic perspective. He doesn't want to know about the politics, and he thinks they ought not matter.

I've learned not to care too much if the painting was made to become a tipped-in plate in a children's book or a paeon to the glory of the Medicis or if its creator was in such agonies that he cut off his ear.

Mike's claim to actually approach Art this way is absurd on the face of it. He knows perfectly well who Lorenzo de'Medici was, and what Lewis Hine was about. He cannot set these things aside. The fact that he can and does approach, say, the Caponigros' photos, which appear to be more or less bereft of politics, does not mean that he can set the history of child labor aside for Hine. He cannot. There is a reason Mike cites Medici instead of some nameless schlub from the same era who also had enough scratch to pay a painter.

This purely aesthetic approach to Art strikes me as very modern, and it is especially appealing to camera enthusiasts.

It is, I think, right about the time the Modernists arose that photography as a discipline, or at any rate a major branch of it, simply jettisoned meaning. There's a lot of stuff going on. We have Hartmann's plea for straight photography, which is orthogonal to politics and meaning, but does kind of crap on the Pictorialist parade of technique. Pictorialism's methods were all bound up with meaning, so there was I think a tendency toward dumping baby, bathwater, and everything else all at once. Along with fuzzy pictures and clumsily posed models, we can observe a reaction against allegory and symbolism.

Social commentary pops up, which can be shot straight but eschews allegory in favor of a gritty reality (Paul Strand, Lewis Hine), which is inherently political as noted. In parallel a new kind of Fine Art arose, drawing on some sort of mishmash of ideas like Impressionism, Expressionism, and Realism. Weston is trying to find the soul of some root or vegetable. Adams is trying to express his feelings about a mountain. A lot of lesser people are struggling just to make attractive pictures.

Modernists are, essentially, privileged. They can afford to just wander around taking pictures of diftwood and green peppers, because they live in an affluent society, and their hobby is relatively cheap and easy. They don't need to flatter people with their Art, they can take time from the portraiture storefront for "personal work" and so on. And so there is no need to shovel a bunch of politics into everything. They can afford to make things that are purely pretty.

In this modern era we have a more or less endless parade of people who are traveling great distances and going to a great deal of trouble mainly so they can test the image quality of their current setup. These are the natural heirs of the Modernists, what after all is more Modernist than the idea that more pixels and more dynamic range is somehow the ultimate expression of Art?

My biggest problem with Mike's position is not that he's personally dismissive of externalities surrounding pieces of Art, but that he's taking pretty clearly the stance that nobody else should consider these things either. We ought, all of us, evaluate a photograph purely on what's inside the frame. This strikes me as profoundly limiting.

Of course we should consider what is inside the frame. Perhaps we ought even to start there. But from there, why stop? If you like the thing, if it interests you, why should you limit your understanding of the thing to the contents of the frame?

More particularly, what on earth is a critic (or, really, anyone who wishes to play critic for even so limited an audience as themselves, which really amounts to taking a real interest in a piece) to do, if the edges of the frame stand as impenetrable walls? How tedious!

The most ironic point here is that while photographers tend to be very fond of the "Art should stand on its own!" school, most photographers are in fact terrible at examining the frame carefully. They glance at it, form a brief opinion, inspect a couple of details, and move on with their lives. Mike, while better than many, does not really get a pass here.

Coming up shortly, I will talk about another commentator who takes almost the opposite tack.

The Luminous Endowment is Closed

When LuLa spun up the legally separate but functionally closely related entity, The Luminous Endowment, I spent a little time sniffing it over quite carefully. I was unable to find any scent of anything sketchy about it, in the end, despite looking quite carefully.

In the end, I came around to being quite in favor of it. The Endowment gave grants to genuinely interesting artists, and generally seemed to be without the usual conflicts of interest, profit motives, or artwashing games that characterize so many grants and prizes out there. The grants, while not immense, were more than mere tokens.

As of the final Form 990, 2017 (which may or may not predate the final round of grants) the endowment had total assets around $320,000. This seems like a lot, but it really is not. The endowment could not afford to pay anyone, really, and given the size of the grants offered, there really was not a lot of runway.

If I had to guess, I would say that the downturn in the camera industry, and in general the slowly declining interest in what we might call "serious amateur photography" made it hard to continue to raise funds. The endowment was in an awkward position. Not enough cash on hand to really fund a full court press to raise more money, and certainly not enough cash to support their ambitious grant program on investment proceeds alone. Add to that a total reliance on a dedicated cadre of volunteers, both to administer the organization, and to judge applications, and you have a pretty tenuous situation.

According to the announcement on LuLa's front page, the Endowment has closed up shop, donating its cash to photolucida to endow a somewhat less ambitious grant program ($3000 a year, it looks like?) which probably can be funded from investment proceeds. Since photolucida has an existing business and staff on hand, they can probably administer this program under the aegis of what they already do, rather than relying on volunteers.

It seems that the Luminous Endowment also had a backlog of Michael's retrospective book, and have sold those to LuLa. The cash from that sale, I assume, goes to photolucida's program with the rest of the assets, and Josh Reichmann has committed to selling these books and donating those proceeds to the same place.

While regrettable, and I am personally sorry to see this closure, this does seem to be a decent course forward. What was not really sustainable has been converted into something that is, and in a perfectly reasonable way.

A 501(c)(3), a normal charitable organization in the USA, always has some clause in its founding paperwork describing what is to happen to assets upon windup, and normally this is something like "find another charity with a mission more or less aligned with ours, and give all our stuff to them" and this appears to be exactly what transpired.

Sayonara, Luminous Endowment, you were good while you lasted.

Storytelling into Memory

Some time ago Lewis Bush was going on about storytelling in the visual book, and complaining that photographers don't study cinema enough, and whatnot. It occurred to me, as I was rooting, piglike, among this cloud of ideas that perhaps I was less interested in literally telling stories, and more interested in leaving roughly the same bootprints in the viewer's mind as telling a story does.

That is, it occurred to me that perhaps emulating the novel (or movie) might not be the only approach. One might do, well, something else. Something unclear. But something else which produces the same effect on the reader as a novel (or a movie). Something that leaves the same traces on the mind as a novel. It is, after all, the traces left behind which matter.

First a little background. For our purposes here I will use the more or less standard definition of story which we may take as essentially the ground truth of some sequence of events. If the story be fictional, well, struggle with that a little. What is the ground truth of "The Snow Queen?" Two children, certain happenings, a reindeer, a queen, and so on. For a true story, a piece of reportage, this is clear, surely? The word narrative refers to a telling of the story. Events may be left out, told out of order for effect, certain events made more important, and so on.

Let us consider memory now, that malleable surface upon which traces are writ, which traces are at this moment of interest.

Your memory may work differently from mine, I suppose. But, this is mine.

When I think of some memory-worthy thing, let us say a job, it manifests as a singular thing, I don't visualize it particularly, but we might imagine it as a box. A box labeled, notionally, as "My Job at X." If I touch the box, shards arise. A person, an event, a project, an office building. Each of these shards is atemporal. I do not perceive them as a passage of time, but again as a singular object, a box if you will. Touching any one of them causes another cloud of shards of memory to arise. Nothing in here resembles, even slightly, a film strip.

What strikes me here is the atemporal nature of these things. It's not that I have a lighting fast brain, and perceive some work project in an instant, it is that there is no instant. The shard of memory corresponding to a project, or an office building, simply is. It has no nature of the passage of time.

To construct, or re-construct, the passage of time I need to string together shards of memory by an act of will. This happened, and then that happened, and then... In effect, I construct a narrative by choosing some path through a continuously arising cloud of atemporal memory shards.

When one memorizes a poem, one commits individual shards of memory to mind, one by one. The first line, and then the second line, and then the third one. Each line is, I think, a timeless shard of memory. It simply is. Touch the first line, speak it, and the shard of memory that is the second arises. Speak that, and the third appears, and so on. This creates a notable problem for musicians, and professional reciters of poetry: if you get lost in the middle the game is up. There are specific memorization techniques which build anchors mid-piece which allow you to recover the chain easily, but it is certainly a chain for most people. Mozart may have been different.

So here is the really interesting observation which I, um, observed:

Of all the physical objects in the real world, the one which most closely resembles a shard of memory is the photograph.

It is atemporal, it simply exists. One apprehends it in a moment. It is, like so much of memory, visual.

Now, to be fair, upon close inspection my visual memories do not in fact resemble photographs literally. I cannot drill into the visual by peering closer, to examine so and so's nose. But still, they feel a lot like a photograph. They feel detailed, complete, and above all, static. I can construct the movie, the moving picture, but only as an effort of will and the result is not very satisfactory as a movie although it is perfectly good as a pure narrative, tethered not to any medium.

Let us revisit the traditionally told story for a moment. The novel, or the movie, or whatever, relates a narrative which reveals, to some degree or another, the story. Both are left, in fragments, in our mind. I can recall bits and piece of Conrad's Nostromo although I have to struggle to recall the name of the main character which is curious because it's the title. My recollection is all muddled up with my probably half-assed understanding of South American politics.

A quick skim of wikipedia refreshes my mind on the story which in turn brings back to mind the critical messages of the narrative (although I am certain most of the clever technical elements of the narrative are completely gone). Conrad's usual themes are in full play here, rendered hot, sunny, and more or less tropical.

This is, I think, typical. What I am left with from a novel, a news story, or a movie, is the bones of the story and the general tone, the message, that the narrative was seeking to carry. These things happened, and that guy was villainous.

So this provides a sort of template we could look to, if wish to emulate storytelling with our visual book. Provide some notion of the ground truth of the thing, and also an impression of the message you wish to carry.

We can think of visuals, especially photographs, as carrying two distinct roles here. The first is simply to reveal the story in some sense, to provide an illustration of the ground truth. Whether the reader recalls the specific photograph or not is irrelevant, the point is that the reader recalls that the thing depicted was. The second role is as a literal memory shard, a photograph might sit in the memory as one of those irreducible atoms of memory, to be conjured up when the book (or story) is recalled.

To return to my favorite visual book, Minamata, I recall a handful of photographs. Tomoko, Shimada and Kawamoto negotiating, and what seems to be a composite memory-shard made up out of several photos of patients (victims) dancing and moving. There are a handful of other profoundly strong photos in here, but they do not pop out at me until I open the book. The story I can conjure up fairly easily. I can re-string the shards of my memory into a rough narrative, although it tends to wander off into DDT and Three Mile Island and so on.

I am struck by how few of the photographs play the second role, here. The many pictures are not worthless, of course, but most of them serve to document the story, to shape the narrative. They do not sit in my memory as themselves.

Smith's book is not a strictly linear narrative, and it does not particularly resemble a novel. It is a loosely related series of essays, each illustrated by photographs. Some of the material is chronological, but not all. Some is background, some is historical, only the core of the book is really a series of newsworthy events related in order. I think one can go further, one can be more fragmented, more almost hallucinatory.

I see now that my magazine, Alley (available on blurb, $8, a tremendous bargain, buy one for all your friends), heads in this direction. The story is nothing much, just that there is an alley behind my house, and that it has certain features, and that alleys have a certain history. It isn't even a series of events. But it is impressionistic, and the narrative flow, such as it is, simply disintegrates by the end. That is on purpose. The message of the narrative is not complex, only that I love this place, this long and narrow plaza behind my house.

There may even be a couple of pictures in here that stick in the memory, but many of them merely serve to reify the place, to prove that it is, that it was, that it has in it these things.

I think I'm on the right track, but I'm not sure where to go from here. Stick around, maybe I'll figure something out!

Writing on PhotoPXL.com

I am writing for Kevin Raber's new venture, PhotoPXL.com, which is something like a reboot of The Luminous Landscape after that changed hands. My pieces are a hopefully on-going series of historical vignettes, with a trifle of critical analysis. Less swearing and more history than here. My nefarious plan is to cover photographers and photographers with brown skin, although paradoxically I think I am going to wind up writing something about a guy named White pretty soon.

Niépce, Daguerre, and Talbot
Archer and Cameron

I like Kevin and I hope he succeeds. His new thing is, apart from me, pretty much the same stuff as LuLa used to be -- high-end camera enthusiasm. He's got Mark Segal writing reviews of papers and going on about gamut volumes and whatnot. Phase One is an advertiser, and the forums have a certain amount of 'I used my Phase One XF78237b12 v1.17 back with the 900mm Super Exactalon lens to photograph this duck' so, it should be pretty familiar to you if you spent any time on LuLa.