The Shootist and the Editor

I will eventually get around, here, to thinking about how people work on archives of other people's photos, but let me first do a little spade work.

I consider "photography" as a creative activity to take part in two modes, by the action as it were of two different tasks. The first is the shootist, who pushes the shutter button. The task here is, roughly, to reduce the idea-free chaos of the world to a finite set of visual ideas. The second task is that of the editor who begins from the set of ideas and produces a clarified, refined, coherent vision. A completed body of work.

This need not be a fancy fine artist. This could be mom shooting her kid's birthday party. As shootist, mom does not photograph the empty bedroom down the hall, or the clouds in the sky, or the silverware drawer. She shoots the cake, the children playing a game, the presents being opened. She reduces 4 or 5 hours of time in a house and yard to a few dozen frames that are related specifically to the party. Later, she throws out the ones that are out of focus. The experiment with motion blur during the game did not work out. The dozen frames around cake eating all look pretty similar, but there's one that feels a little better than the rest. Mom refines and clarifies the ideas around "birthday party" and reduces the pictures to those that show the birthday party as she wants to show it.

Mom posts 17 pictures to social media. The end. The shootist, and the editor, have both done their work.

Of course the same thing applies to Robert Frank and his Guggenheim journey. Robert Frank, shootist, reduced the infinite depth and texture of America to 28,000 visual ideas. Robert Frank, editor, further reduced and clarified those 28,000 ideas to 83 pictures in a book, a singular idea of dazzling clarity.

Naturally, the two roles, or tasks, are not perfectly distinct. They are not even two sides of the same coin, but perhaps two sides of the same marble. As with "tall" versus "short," where one leaves off and the other begins may not be precisely clear. Nevertheless the two things are different. One could argue also that someone working from, say, Google's Street View is acting in the role of shootist, rather than editor, since the collection of pictures is so vast, and is so devoid of anything resembling an idea.

It's complicated. As we are adults, I think we may continue regardless of the risks.

Consider now the creative who works with an archive of photographs. They could be found photographs. They could be someone's discard pile. They could be someone's entire output. They could be someone's keeper pile.

I am interested here specifically in archives shot with intent, an archive of ideas however half-formed. This excludes Street View, surveillance footage, and so on. Arguably it excludes Winogrand's later work (consider that remark 50% in jest) and, as usual, the lines are not crisply defined. Further, for reasons that will become clear, I exclude collaborations between the archive worker and the shootist.

We're talking about Szarkowsi and Winogrand, Maloof and Maier, Contis and Lange.

We have a pile of visual ideas, made with intent, by a shootist. Our notional creative arrives, in the role of the editor, to do something with the pile.

Because the editor is not the same person as the shootist, the editor's work includes reading the photographs in very much the same as when you and I look at a picture. The editor has no privileged position here with respect to the visual ideas represented by the pictures.

In this case, the editor begins with a loose pile of ideas, and spends time with those loose ideas. The editor then develops a refined, clarified, idea, and selects and assembles photographs to embody that idea (or ideas). The editor's idea might be intended as a new thing entirely, as is often the case with work done with found photos. It might be an attempt to edit "as-if" the editor had been the shootist as well, in which case the editor attempts to locate intention in the pile of work and to refine and clarify that idea.

No matter what the situation, though, there is bound to be some kind of disconnection, a discontinuity. The editor, holding no privileged position with respect to the photographs, cannot and will not read them exactly as the shootist would have. The editor might get close, perhaps being on first base rather than home plate, but cannot expect to take the place of the shootist. We, reading the editor's work equally imprecisely, cannot even expect to be at first base, but will inevitably find ourselves somewhere in the outfield.

There is no particular reason the editor's work cannot be in some meaningful way "good", perhaps even better than what the shootist did or might have done.

What it cannot be is photography in its full flower, in the form of shootist and editor, combined, producing a singular coherent vision start to finish. It contains, inevitably, a discontinuity.

When Sam Contis went to work on Dorothea Lange's castoffs, she found something new (a simulacrum of Sam Contis) and ran with it. Her book is, arguably, pretty good. More to the point, there's no essential, structural, reason it can't be superb. What it is not, however, is Dorothea Lange's work.

Let us take a moment to follow a detour. If the editor and the shootist are two different people working in collaboration, the situation is different. With the shootist, the original idea-finder, in the loop the whole thing changes. At least in theory the editor can work as an editor, and then check in with the shootist. Whatever alchemy and inexpressible ideas the shootist may have had can be brought to bear, can be embodied in the final outcome. So, the situation I am really interested in here postulates a shootist making photographic ideas with intent, and an editor — not in communication with the shootist — performing the task of editor.

My goal here, though, is to work out what a critic ought to do with one of these things.

The critic can, first of all, seek to get their arms around the original archive. What can be learned of the original pile of visual ideas? Can one examine the archive itself? Are there other publications shedding light on parts of it? Can we, perhaps, make sense of the underlying archive by close examination of the work the editor has published?

Second, the critic can attempt to discern the seam, the discontinuity, which inheres in the situation. Where does the shootist leave off, and the editor begin?

Third, of course, the critic can examine the work itself to see what can be seen.

It may occur to you, if you've been paying attention, that one can do this with the work of a single creative worker as well. There isn't the same kind of discontinuity, but still you can look at the raw pile of pictures and attempt to trace the ideas as they are refined and finally delivered in some form. This is not untrue. It's a kind of standard deep-dive form of criticism, I think, albeit a bit old school.

The single-person photographer is in some ways lot more opaque. When shootist and editor are one, the artistic process is more or less hermetically sealed. Nobody really knows what the hell is going on in there except, maybe, the artist. When the editor is separate, however, the gap creates an opportunity.

No more must we cope with the potentially irrational, potentially incomprehensible interior processes of a brain. The editor simply sat down with the photos and looked at them, just as we might have. The process is brought firmly to earth here. You and I could just as well have looked at those same pictures, have read them, and created something or other from our second-hand understanding of the visual ideas we're examining.

The editor, reading the original ideas, internalizes them and makes something that is essentially new from them. Whether the editor is attempting to paint a new painting based on a sketch, or whether the editor is simply using the notes as inspiration for something intentionally different, it hardly matters. The result is new. It might be an attempt to copy the original ideas, a sort of painting of a painting; or it might be by intention an entirely new thing.

At this point I feel comfortable asserting baldly that this kind of thing is inherently different from photography as we know and understand it. The discontinuity inherent in the thing renders it so. The two minds at work, not entirely (or perhaps not even slightly) in concert makes it so. It is something different.

I feel comfortable also in asserting baldly that the thing is difficult to get hold of. The discontinuity is potentially an opportunity, but also a difficulty. It is usually buried, sometimes on purpose. The editor, invariably, seeks to make something coherent and meaningful, and will consciously or unconsciously attempt to erase any latent attempt by the shootist to assert anything that would disturb that vision of the work. The photographs are bent, invariably, to a task for which they are not entirely (or not at all) suited.

The abilities of the two players, the supplier of raw material, the editor, are rarely in sync. The result seems more likely correlate with the smaller talent than the larger, where there is a difference. The best one can reasonably hope for is some sort of lowest common denominator. The worst is an incoherent mess, the discontinuity embarrassingly visible.

Mostly, of course, these things are an attempt at cashing in. Maloof has done rather well for himself making a mess of the nanny's pile of stuff. Sam Contis didn't sell many copies of her first book Deep Springs, but when she made a fair copy of it using Dorothea Lange's photos, she got a writeup in the Wall Street Journal (and loads of other press as well, I dare say the book is doing extremely well as these things go.) Szarkowski mainly embarrassed himself with Winogrand's archive, but I think they probably sold some books there as well and of course Winogrand remains something of an industry cash cow to the present day.

To an extent it's just the way Art is made. It's a sausage factory, and looking too closely at what goes in is generally going to turn the stomach. It's also rich, albeit messy, ground for the working critic!

I know I have turned it in to a great success.