Conventional wisdom among Fine Art Photographers is that one should process ones negatives and prints to ensure that they last as long as possible. Matting and framing likewise. Please use only museum grade eternal mat board, light-proof glass so that the print will never be harmed by radiation, and a lead frame to keep the neutrinos at bay.
As I have commented before, in general you are simply not that good. Nobody cares enough. Your eternally preserved photography will, within a few decades of your death, wind up in the trash, discarded.
Let us suppose that you are that good. Let us suppose that your print which truly captures the essence of something or other does survive to be admired 200 years from now.
Our best available evidence suggests that, 200 years hence, your print will be admired for being 200 years old and not much else. It will be interesting not for the moment it froze in amber, but because it froze in amber a moment, a moment that is 200 years old. Nobody will much care about the content, or the artistry. They will be interested in the age of this relic, and what, if anything, can be gleaned about their ancestors from it. Old paintings, precisely because they do not freeze a moment, are interesting as art. They haven't got the inherently more interesting feature of captured reality that photographs enjoy, to overwhelm their artistry, their technique, and whatever other features of a painting are interesting.
After due consideration, I don't want my work revered for being old. I do want it loved for being good, but this appears to be an essentially ephemeral phenomenon with photographs. If you want reverence and respect for the artistic value of the work, you must (as far as we know) accept the ephemeral nature of that reverence and respect.
If you're ok with your work being respected merely for existing, then by all means process archivally and stick it in a steel box engraved Do Not Open Until February 2213. Assuming the box doesn't get lost and the world does not end, your freakish black and white two dimensional thingies will be much admired for their strange ancientness.
Monday, February 4, 2013
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Photography and Thought Crimes
In modern society we have, for the most part, discarded the primitive notion that an image partakes of the reality of the thing depicted. We do not feel, generally, that a photograph of a thing is inherently part of that thing, or that photographing a person literally takes something from that person. There is one area, however, where we seem to be holding on to this idea. This is the case of the apparent pedophile, photographing our children. Let me remark that as of this writing, my daughter is three and a half years old.
We collectively freak right the fuck out when we hear of some apparent pervert photographing little girls on the street or in some other public place. You can make arguments about privacy, or about the fear of the pervert becoming a kidnapper and stealing out little girls away, but these are pretty much shams. There's no expectation of privacy granted to anyone else in a public place, why are kids special? The probability that your child will be kidnapped by a stranger is rather low. If you're worried about that perhaps you should worry more about how much time you spend in the car with your child. Your daughter is much more likely to be killed in an automobile accident than in a sex crime, let alone a sex crime perpetrated by a stranger.
Well, why are kids special? The fact is, we expect them to be given more privacy than adults both in our minds and in the law. There are two things going on here.
The first is that we very much want to prosecute and punish pedophiles for their thoughts. Since we, as a society here in the USA, do not officially recognize Thought Crimes as a punishable offense, we seek out something concrete. Photographs serve the purpose here. By criminalizing the photographs, we allow a veneer of sanity to cover our desire to punish people for thinking thoughts we find abhorrent.
The second thing going on here is that we feel the primitive notion that the photograph steals something from our daughter. The photograph partakes of our daughter's reality, and when some pervert takes it home and uses it in some abhorrent way, that in some way violates and injures our daughter. I have argued that photographs do indeed damage but I stopped short of the mad notion that it literally damages the subject. In this case, any actual damage to the little girl is either non-existant or so distant as to be effectively non-existant. Yes, yes, if the pervert then kidnaps and murders the little girl, that's not so distant. That's also a completely different thing, and is an actual crime and so on, that has pretty much nothing to do with the photograph.
While we're certainly not comfortably with the idea of a pedophile looking at our child, remembering them, and later having an abhorrent fantasy, it's not nearly as upsetting as the same pedophile using a camera as a memory aid in precisely the same way. This is because of our magical thinking about imagery.
I'm no fan of pedophiles either, to be sure. I feel the same abhorrence about such photographs that you do. I do, however, recognize it as magical thinking.
If you happen to stumble across this post somehow, and are now overwhelmed with the urge to comment something about how horrible I am, please re-read the post a few times. Make at least a token effort to understand what I wrote, and that I am not advocating that pedophiles be given free children, nor am I advocating the decriminalization of child pornography. Thanks.
We collectively freak right the fuck out when we hear of some apparent pervert photographing little girls on the street or in some other public place. You can make arguments about privacy, or about the fear of the pervert becoming a kidnapper and stealing out little girls away, but these are pretty much shams. There's no expectation of privacy granted to anyone else in a public place, why are kids special? The probability that your child will be kidnapped by a stranger is rather low. If you're worried about that perhaps you should worry more about how much time you spend in the car with your child. Your daughter is much more likely to be killed in an automobile accident than in a sex crime, let alone a sex crime perpetrated by a stranger.
Well, why are kids special? The fact is, we expect them to be given more privacy than adults both in our minds and in the law. There are two things going on here.
The first is that we very much want to prosecute and punish pedophiles for their thoughts. Since we, as a society here in the USA, do not officially recognize Thought Crimes as a punishable offense, we seek out something concrete. Photographs serve the purpose here. By criminalizing the photographs, we allow a veneer of sanity to cover our desire to punish people for thinking thoughts we find abhorrent.
The second thing going on here is that we feel the primitive notion that the photograph steals something from our daughter. The photograph partakes of our daughter's reality, and when some pervert takes it home and uses it in some abhorrent way, that in some way violates and injures our daughter. I have argued that photographs do indeed damage but I stopped short of the mad notion that it literally damages the subject. In this case, any actual damage to the little girl is either non-existant or so distant as to be effectively non-existant. Yes, yes, if the pervert then kidnaps and murders the little girl, that's not so distant. That's also a completely different thing, and is an actual crime and so on, that has pretty much nothing to do with the photograph.
While we're certainly not comfortably with the idea of a pedophile looking at our child, remembering them, and later having an abhorrent fantasy, it's not nearly as upsetting as the same pedophile using a camera as a memory aid in precisely the same way. This is because of our magical thinking about imagery.
I'm no fan of pedophiles either, to be sure. I feel the same abhorrence about such photographs that you do. I do, however, recognize it as magical thinking.
If you happen to stumble across this post somehow, and are now overwhelmed with the urge to comment something about how horrible I am, please re-read the post a few times. Make at least a token effort to understand what I wrote, and that I am not advocating that pedophiles be given free children, nor am I advocating the decriminalization of child pornography. Thanks.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Susan Sontag, On Photography
In 1977 Susan Sontag published a collection of essays entitled On Photography. This book is, quite rightly, considered to be an important body of thought on the subject of Photographs and Photography. I review it now, as is my wont, some decades later.
The essays in the book were previously, separately, published, and so there is a certain amount of repeated material and thought across them. Sontag covers the same ideas over and over, but the repetition is not particularly offensive or irritating in the book. Her ideas are sometimes somewhat vague and, to my mind, poorly presented and supported. The repetition gives a sort of parallax view of what she's getting at, which is useful and important.
The most prominent theme present in the book is that Susan Sontag is very smart and knows a lot of things. It's not quite a New Yorker film review, but it's tending in that direction. These were essays written by a writer living in New York City, for other people living in New York City. The only two topics that really seem to go over well with that crowd are: Goodness, I Am Very Very Smart, and New York City Is Very Awesome, Isn't It? So, it is no surprise, really, to find this theme so thoroughly expounded. Despite all this, she manages to bring up some very good ideas, and discuss quite a few interesting things.
The next most important ideas that she hammers on a fair bit is the two contradictory views of photography espoused by photographers and the photographic intelligentsia. On the one hand, photographs represent and reveal that which is true and real. On the other hand, photographs are Art with a capital A and therefore reveal.. other things.. ideas, the photographer, some sort of higher truth, anything and everything but the proximate subject. In this age of digital photography and digital editing this seems a little trite, but vestiges of this conflict remain with us in, for instance, the world of photojournalism. There certainly remain photographers who insist that their images reveal truth, that they tell a true story. The conflict between subject or image as the dominant element remains, however. Is this a picture of a candlestick, or is it an image in which one of the graphically important forms happens to look like a candlestick?
Sontag points out (quite correctly) that photographs alter our perceptions of reality. The fact that photographs look real, and are imprints of reality, (the preceding theme notwithstanding) causes us to freight them with extra veritas. We believe a photograph more easily and thoroughly than a drawing, or a verbal description. In some ways, we see them as more real than the thing itself. Sometimes we have not seen the thing itself, sometimes we saw it for only a moment, sometimes we saw it long ago. The photograph is here, now. It alters our memory of the thing, and our understanding of the thing, more than we know, more than we admit. This is truly the most interesting idea in the book. Sontag's treatment of it goes in to some depth, and she spends a fair bit of time rather presciently pointing out the effects of more and more photographs passing our eyes day by day. She seems, some time before 1977, to have felt tremors of facebook, flickr, instagram, et al resonating down through time to wake her up at night in a cold sweat.
Most controversially, Sontag makes the assertion (repeatedly) that photography is inherently aggressive, appropriative, and damaging to that which it photographs. She mostly states these as truths, giving very little support and very little clarification of what she even means. What is the nature of the damage? She does cite some examples, of photographers damaging indigenous cultures in the act of photographing them through a process of suggesting changes and giving direction. The subjects would, allegedly, alter their dances, costumes, and so on, to comply with the wishes of the hordes of photographers swarming past to document the "dying culture". Arguably Sontag is confusing bad ethnography for an inherent property of photography. My best guess is that she is proceeding from the idea that photographs alter our perception of things to the idea that this change, in and of itself, constitutes damage. Damage, not to the thing, but to our idea of the thing, which idea is in its way much more important than the thing. It's also possible she's simply saying this stuff over and over again to create a sort of platform of repetition upon which to base an assault on pornography, an assault which never came? Whether her conception of the destructiveness of photography is the same as mine we shall never know, but her notion caused me to think it through carefully.
Sontag's thinking is muddled throughout, to be honest. There are such gems as her assertion that the camera creates a new reality, a little copy of part of reality (which is fine so far as it goes and an interesting viewpoint) and in doing so denies that reality is enough. This is the sort of philosophical-sounding fiddle-faddle that gets philosophy a bad name. Making a photograph no more denies that reality is enough than does making a pot of soup. Certainly I felt that reality was not enough - what it needed was soup, on account of I was hungry in this reality, and wanted some soup. It's true, but not very interesting. Every act of change denies the adequacy of reality in exactly the same way, the fact that the camera is making a little copy of reality is irrelevant. It certainly sounds cool, though.
The book is a maze of this sort of thing.
The value is not really in that Sontag has it all figured out, but that she's a veritable river of weird ideas, many of which are true in some sense. You simply have to do all the spade work yourself, and sort out what's nonsense and what's true. The value in her book is really in the spade work you are forced to do to make sense of it all. I believe we call this sort of thing "thought provoking."
The essays in the book were previously, separately, published, and so there is a certain amount of repeated material and thought across them. Sontag covers the same ideas over and over, but the repetition is not particularly offensive or irritating in the book. Her ideas are sometimes somewhat vague and, to my mind, poorly presented and supported. The repetition gives a sort of parallax view of what she's getting at, which is useful and important.
The most prominent theme present in the book is that Susan Sontag is very smart and knows a lot of things. It's not quite a New Yorker film review, but it's tending in that direction. These were essays written by a writer living in New York City, for other people living in New York City. The only two topics that really seem to go over well with that crowd are: Goodness, I Am Very Very Smart, and New York City Is Very Awesome, Isn't It? So, it is no surprise, really, to find this theme so thoroughly expounded. Despite all this, she manages to bring up some very good ideas, and discuss quite a few interesting things.
The next most important ideas that she hammers on a fair bit is the two contradictory views of photography espoused by photographers and the photographic intelligentsia. On the one hand, photographs represent and reveal that which is true and real. On the other hand, photographs are Art with a capital A and therefore reveal.. other things.. ideas, the photographer, some sort of higher truth, anything and everything but the proximate subject. In this age of digital photography and digital editing this seems a little trite, but vestiges of this conflict remain with us in, for instance, the world of photojournalism. There certainly remain photographers who insist that their images reveal truth, that they tell a true story. The conflict between subject or image as the dominant element remains, however. Is this a picture of a candlestick, or is it an image in which one of the graphically important forms happens to look like a candlestick?
Sontag points out (quite correctly) that photographs alter our perceptions of reality. The fact that photographs look real, and are imprints of reality, (the preceding theme notwithstanding) causes us to freight them with extra veritas. We believe a photograph more easily and thoroughly than a drawing, or a verbal description. In some ways, we see them as more real than the thing itself. Sometimes we have not seen the thing itself, sometimes we saw it for only a moment, sometimes we saw it long ago. The photograph is here, now. It alters our memory of the thing, and our understanding of the thing, more than we know, more than we admit. This is truly the most interesting idea in the book. Sontag's treatment of it goes in to some depth, and she spends a fair bit of time rather presciently pointing out the effects of more and more photographs passing our eyes day by day. She seems, some time before 1977, to have felt tremors of facebook, flickr, instagram, et al resonating down through time to wake her up at night in a cold sweat.
Most controversially, Sontag makes the assertion (repeatedly) that photography is inherently aggressive, appropriative, and damaging to that which it photographs. She mostly states these as truths, giving very little support and very little clarification of what she even means. What is the nature of the damage? She does cite some examples, of photographers damaging indigenous cultures in the act of photographing them through a process of suggesting changes and giving direction. The subjects would, allegedly, alter their dances, costumes, and so on, to comply with the wishes of the hordes of photographers swarming past to document the "dying culture". Arguably Sontag is confusing bad ethnography for an inherent property of photography. My best guess is that she is proceeding from the idea that photographs alter our perception of things to the idea that this change, in and of itself, constitutes damage. Damage, not to the thing, but to our idea of the thing, which idea is in its way much more important than the thing. It's also possible she's simply saying this stuff over and over again to create a sort of platform of repetition upon which to base an assault on pornography, an assault which never came? Whether her conception of the destructiveness of photography is the same as mine we shall never know, but her notion caused me to think it through carefully.
Sontag's thinking is muddled throughout, to be honest. There are such gems as her assertion that the camera creates a new reality, a little copy of part of reality (which is fine so far as it goes and an interesting viewpoint) and in doing so denies that reality is enough. This is the sort of philosophical-sounding fiddle-faddle that gets philosophy a bad name. Making a photograph no more denies that reality is enough than does making a pot of soup. Certainly I felt that reality was not enough - what it needed was soup, on account of I was hungry in this reality, and wanted some soup. It's true, but not very interesting. Every act of change denies the adequacy of reality in exactly the same way, the fact that the camera is making a little copy of reality is irrelevant. It certainly sounds cool, though.
The book is a maze of this sort of thing.
The value is not really in that Sontag has it all figured out, but that she's a veritable river of weird ideas, many of which are true in some sense. You simply have to do all the spade work yourself, and sort out what's nonsense and what's true. The value in her book is really in the spade work you are forced to do to make sense of it all. I believe we call this sort of thing "thought provoking."
Saturday, January 26, 2013
The Shadow World II
This is a follow on to this prior remark.
To Susan Sontag, writing in the 1970s, the print was the photograph. Photographs did not exist in any interesting way apart from the print. Moving pictures had a couple of other varieties, but photographs were prints. This is, obviously, no longer the case. While we may be printing more photographs than ever, as a percentage of the images we actually see the print is negligible. Even printed photographs in magazines have the ephemeral nature that the online ones do, in the sense that they are with us only for a short time before fading in to memory.
To Sontag, a photograph froze a moment in amber and converted it to a Past Moment instantly. The moment would then recede slowly in time, changing in our minds as it went, but always frozen there in the print. The print would deteriorate, the image itself might change a little, and our idea of the image would certainly change. An old photograph is interesting largely because it is old, because it is a moment from long long ago, preserved for our amusement and education. The subject becomes less and less important. This strikes me as an essentially accurate characterization of the situation in the 1970s. It might not be all-encompassing, but it covers a lot of the territory that was in play at the time. The fascination with old prints and negatives remains with us today, if anything amplified by the everything-is-digital world we live in now. These physical artifacts appear, correctly, not merely old but of another era. A negative with an interesting provenance (whether true or not) is now virtually a fetish object, and the subject doesn't matter a fig.
As I have suggested earlier, things are now different. A change in scale to vastly more photographs produced at a vastly higher pace has occurred, a change in scale so vast as to manifest very much like a change in kind. Photographs are now rarely printed, and are almost never within our scope for very long. There is no time for a photograph, a snapshot of the birthday party or the wedding or the vacation, to get old enough to be interesting as an image from a past time. They slide back along the timeline at a rate of one hour per hour, until in a couple of weeks they are too many clicks away to ever look at again.
In the 1970s, Sontag expressed the belief (and perhaps concern) that we were increasingly existing through the medium of photographs. An event which was not photographed did not happen, in a sense. Our memories of a birthday party, an inauguration, a moon landing, or a vacation were all influenced profoundly by the photographs of those events, whether we were present or not. We lived partially, but in a meaningful way, in a reality made up of photographs, a reality which stretched into the past until there were no photographs.
We live in a real world of real things and real events, but ever-increasingly spend time with the shadow world of photographs of things and events that have taken place recently. The shadow world contains images of things we experienced in the real world, and of things we did not, but all or almost all from within the last couple of weeks. This shadow world takes up an increasing amount of space in our mental model of our life. We spend less time attending birthday parties, and we attend far more of them by proxy through photographs shared by our friends.
How often do we experience a vague memory of having attending some event that we did not? How much of our memory of the wedding we did attend is mediated by the photographs we remember from it? Are these effects increasing in frequency and depth in this world of facebook, endless snapshots, and small tile-shaped mobile phones? Is this good or bad?
I don't know, but it worries me a bit. We seem to be living a much broader life, and a life whose broadness is largely by proxy. It seems reasonable that increased breadth is paid for by decreased depth. It seems reasonable that decreased depth, somehow, and whatever that even means, is undesireable.
To Susan Sontag, writing in the 1970s, the print was the photograph. Photographs did not exist in any interesting way apart from the print. Moving pictures had a couple of other varieties, but photographs were prints. This is, obviously, no longer the case. While we may be printing more photographs than ever, as a percentage of the images we actually see the print is negligible. Even printed photographs in magazines have the ephemeral nature that the online ones do, in the sense that they are with us only for a short time before fading in to memory.
To Sontag, a photograph froze a moment in amber and converted it to a Past Moment instantly. The moment would then recede slowly in time, changing in our minds as it went, but always frozen there in the print. The print would deteriorate, the image itself might change a little, and our idea of the image would certainly change. An old photograph is interesting largely because it is old, because it is a moment from long long ago, preserved for our amusement and education. The subject becomes less and less important. This strikes me as an essentially accurate characterization of the situation in the 1970s. It might not be all-encompassing, but it covers a lot of the territory that was in play at the time. The fascination with old prints and negatives remains with us today, if anything amplified by the everything-is-digital world we live in now. These physical artifacts appear, correctly, not merely old but of another era. A negative with an interesting provenance (whether true or not) is now virtually a fetish object, and the subject doesn't matter a fig.
As I have suggested earlier, things are now different. A change in scale to vastly more photographs produced at a vastly higher pace has occurred, a change in scale so vast as to manifest very much like a change in kind. Photographs are now rarely printed, and are almost never within our scope for very long. There is no time for a photograph, a snapshot of the birthday party or the wedding or the vacation, to get old enough to be interesting as an image from a past time. They slide back along the timeline at a rate of one hour per hour, until in a couple of weeks they are too many clicks away to ever look at again.
In the 1970s, Sontag expressed the belief (and perhaps concern) that we were increasingly existing through the medium of photographs. An event which was not photographed did not happen, in a sense. Our memories of a birthday party, an inauguration, a moon landing, or a vacation were all influenced profoundly by the photographs of those events, whether we were present or not. We lived partially, but in a meaningful way, in a reality made up of photographs, a reality which stretched into the past until there were no photographs.
We live in a real world of real things and real events, but ever-increasingly spend time with the shadow world of photographs of things and events that have taken place recently. The shadow world contains images of things we experienced in the real world, and of things we did not, but all or almost all from within the last couple of weeks. This shadow world takes up an increasing amount of space in our mental model of our life. We spend less time attending birthday parties, and we attend far more of them by proxy through photographs shared by our friends.
How often do we experience a vague memory of having attending some event that we did not? How much of our memory of the wedding we did attend is mediated by the photographs we remember from it? Are these effects increasing in frequency and depth in this world of facebook, endless snapshots, and small tile-shaped mobile phones? Is this good or bad?
I don't know, but it worries me a bit. We seem to be living a much broader life, and a life whose broadness is largely by proxy. It seems reasonable that increased breadth is paid for by decreased depth. It seems reasonable that decreased depth, somehow, and whatever that even means, is undesireable.
Friday, January 25, 2013
Forgeries
I've talked about forgery in art before. My thinking has evolved, a little, from there.
In the entry previous to this one I suggest that a wet plate photograph would lose value, were it revealed to be a digital photograph edited to look like a wet plate photograph. People would likely be angry and upset. There are really two things going on here. The first is that someone lied to us, and we are justly irritated by this. The second is that we are forced to adjust our thinking about the photograph, reducing its value, and this is something we're not terribly happy with. Quite apart from the lie, we are forced into a situation where we must admit that we were wrong, in some sense. The image isn't as good as we thought it was.
This is somewhat analogous to what happens when a painting is shown to be a forgery. It's not a Vermeer, it's a van Meegeren. It's less valuable. Again, people are angry because they were lied to. Again, they are angry because they are forced to devalue the work, they were wrong about the painting.
In the case of the painting, however (and this is where my thinking has evolved and changed) there is an actual devaluation. It is perhaps minor, but it is real. When the painting was a Vermeer, it fit into the body of Vermeer's work. It taught us a little about Vermeer's evolution and his ideas about painting. It helped to fill out a portrait of Vermeer for us, as a sort of anthropological artifact of the man's life. When the painting is revealed as a forgery, it takes all that back. We have to unwind our understanding of Vermeer a little. The painting's value as a source of information about someone interesting drops to zero (well, not quite, van Meegeren was interesting as well). The painting's connection to other work is broken, it is no longer a valuable piece of a puzzle, it's just an oddly shaped piece of cardboard after all.
Is this devaluation proportional to the outrage? Probably not. Still, there is a genuine loss of value here.
A fake wet plate photograph shown to be a fake loses no such connection. To be sure, it's no longer connected with wet plate photography, but so what? There is no corresponding network effect for wet plate photography. We do not need more wet plate images to truly teach us about wet plate. We lose nothing of our understanding of wet plate when a fake is revealed. We have thousands, perhaps 100s of thousands, of these things already, and anyways who cares about a portrait of wet plate? In this case we're mad simply because we were lied to, and because we have our nose rudely shoved in the fact that we decided the photograph was good because it was wet plate, not because it was actually good.
In the entry previous to this one I suggest that a wet plate photograph would lose value, were it revealed to be a digital photograph edited to look like a wet plate photograph. People would likely be angry and upset. There are really two things going on here. The first is that someone lied to us, and we are justly irritated by this. The second is that we are forced to adjust our thinking about the photograph, reducing its value, and this is something we're not terribly happy with. Quite apart from the lie, we are forced into a situation where we must admit that we were wrong, in some sense. The image isn't as good as we thought it was.
This is somewhat analogous to what happens when a painting is shown to be a forgery. It's not a Vermeer, it's a van Meegeren. It's less valuable. Again, people are angry because they were lied to. Again, they are angry because they are forced to devalue the work, they were wrong about the painting.
In the case of the painting, however (and this is where my thinking has evolved and changed) there is an actual devaluation. It is perhaps minor, but it is real. When the painting was a Vermeer, it fit into the body of Vermeer's work. It taught us a little about Vermeer's evolution and his ideas about painting. It helped to fill out a portrait of Vermeer for us, as a sort of anthropological artifact of the man's life. When the painting is revealed as a forgery, it takes all that back. We have to unwind our understanding of Vermeer a little. The painting's value as a source of information about someone interesting drops to zero (well, not quite, van Meegeren was interesting as well). The painting's connection to other work is broken, it is no longer a valuable piece of a puzzle, it's just an oddly shaped piece of cardboard after all.
Is this devaluation proportional to the outrage? Probably not. Still, there is a genuine loss of value here.
A fake wet plate photograph shown to be a fake loses no such connection. To be sure, it's no longer connected with wet plate photography, but so what? There is no corresponding network effect for wet plate photography. We do not need more wet plate images to truly teach us about wet plate. We lose nothing of our understanding of wet plate when a fake is revealed. We have thousands, perhaps 100s of thousands, of these things already, and anyways who cares about a portrait of wet plate? In this case we're mad simply because we were lied to, and because we have our nose rudely shoved in the fact that we decided the photograph was good because it was wet plate, not because it was actually good.
Process does matter?
This isn't a post about a book, but we start off with a book:
Over on The Online Photographer, we have a book review. It's a book of wet plate photography, apparently beautifully reproduced and so on. I believe that the reproductions are wonderful, I trust both ToP and the specific reviewer completely. I don't even know what's in the book, but the samples given in the review and on the amazon.com page for the book suggest that this is a pretty mixed bag of images. Some not very good ones, and a some really very good ones. It does look oddly like a collection of snapshots, although obviously one does not "snap" much of anything with collodion. It strikes me that this is primarily a book of wet plate photographs, and that the images themselves don't really matter all that much.
Please note that I accuse nobody of anything, I have no reason to suppose that the book reviewed is anything but 100 percent genuine. However, imagine the outcry should we find out later that the portfolio was actually make up of 20 wet plate images, and 46 digital ones that were photoshopped to look wet plate.
The fact that it was hard to make should not elevate a photograph one millimeter. We should not value photographs more for being shot on film, or developed in coffee. We should not value photographs more for being shot on large format, or wet plate, or from hard-to-reach vantage points. What matters is whether the result is any good. We might respect the photographer for laboring, but we must not judge the results based on the labor. Paintings are not judged or sold by the hour worked, nor are sculptures. Photographs should not get a special pass here.
Why does photography continue always to trend to measuring the value of the result by the labor that went into it? Is it because photography is, ultimately, very very easy? You just press the button, after all. Is it because we prefer an artisanal component to fine art, and so when artisanal labor is introduced to photography, we feel easier about treating it as fine art? This was never a very good idea, and in this age of trivially easy fakery, this is surely a more dangerous and wrong-headed notion than ever before.
Over on The Online Photographer, we have a book review. It's a book of wet plate photography, apparently beautifully reproduced and so on. I believe that the reproductions are wonderful, I trust both ToP and the specific reviewer completely. I don't even know what's in the book, but the samples given in the review and on the amazon.com page for the book suggest that this is a pretty mixed bag of images. Some not very good ones, and a some really very good ones. It does look oddly like a collection of snapshots, although obviously one does not "snap" much of anything with collodion. It strikes me that this is primarily a book of wet plate photographs, and that the images themselves don't really matter all that much.
Please note that I accuse nobody of anything, I have no reason to suppose that the book reviewed is anything but 100 percent genuine. However, imagine the outcry should we find out later that the portfolio was actually make up of 20 wet plate images, and 46 digital ones that were photoshopped to look wet plate.
The fact that it was hard to make should not elevate a photograph one millimeter. We should not value photographs more for being shot on film, or developed in coffee. We should not value photographs more for being shot on large format, or wet plate, or from hard-to-reach vantage points. What matters is whether the result is any good. We might respect the photographer for laboring, but we must not judge the results based on the labor. Paintings are not judged or sold by the hour worked, nor are sculptures. Photographs should not get a special pass here.
Why does photography continue always to trend to measuring the value of the result by the labor that went into it? Is it because photography is, ultimately, very very easy? You just press the button, after all. Is it because we prefer an artisanal component to fine art, and so when artisanal labor is introduced to photography, we feel easier about treating it as fine art? This was never a very good idea, and in this age of trivially easy fakery, this is surely a more dangerous and wrong-headed notion than ever before.
Sunday, January 20, 2013
The Shadow World
To make any more sense of the appropriative nature of photography, we have to get a couple of things clearly understood in our own minds. There are objects in the world, with a reality of their own, they are physical things which exist. Tables, chairs, buildings, people, trees, and so on. Corresponding to these real objects, there are ideas of those objects which we have in our minds, and relationships we have to those objects. How I feel about that table, how society as a whole feels about Angelina Jolie, my Idea of my wife.
The second kind of thing is abstract, vague, intangible. It's also more important than the first thing. There are deep questions of philosophy and quantum physics which I don't care about and which don't matter here: Whether and how a tree "exists" without the presence of an observer, and how that observer changes and alters its reality I neither know nor particularly care. We can say with confidence that an unobserved tree is not very interesting to anyone, and that's all that matters. The point here is that our personal and societal ideas about objects are what's important, ultimately, precisely because an unobserved object is -- at best -- pretty uninteresting.
You would argue that a giant meteor, as yet unobserved, but aimed to obliterate the Earth is pretty interesting, but I maintain that it's not interesting until we, however briefly, observe its existence.
Let's also take a moment to discard the notion that an image partakes in some literal way in the reality of the thing imaged. Whether true or not, I am not interested here in notions of voodoo, or the idea that a photograph steals ones soul. These are idea that go back a long ways, but in modern society we tend not to believe them (at least not to admit it), and anyways what I am trying to get at is what might underlie such a belief.
A photograph alters, however minutely, our idea of the object photographed. An image might not literally diminish other elements of our idea of the object, but by creating new aspects of that idea it makes the other aspects relatively smaller. Our experience of an actual McDonald's hamburger is a real thing in our mind. Images of that hamburger add to that idea, that mental model of the McDonald's hamburger. While our real experience is not diminished, advertisers can alter our overall attitude by filling our mind with competing images of delicious and desirable hamburgers. The image of the burger grows with each photograph and video, the actual experience diminishes in importance. This is why advertising works.
In this same way our society's understanding of Winston Churchill is largely driven by a single iconic image, the cigar-less portrait made by Karsh. Our relationship with Half-Dome, whether we have seen it or not, is largely defined by Adams photographs and the infinite cloud of copies made by everyone. The Eiffel tower has no particular iconic photograph that I know of, but has certainly been reduced to a postcard in our minds, and is well on its way to becoming a snapshot containing a blurry black object behind a pair of vapidly grinning tourists. Celebrities are featherless bipeds who exist primarily in photographs and videos.
Consider a homeless man named Bill. Bill has, perhaps, a little trouble with beer. Maybe Bill's wife died in a car accident 20 years ago, perhaps Bill knows the lyrics to every Journey song. This is Bill to the dozen or so people who actually know Bill. Now some idiot with a fedora and a Canon 5DII comes along doing some "street photography" and takes a picture of Bill. This picture is over-processed and dumped on to flickr. At this point Bill's actual reality is unchanged. The idea of Bill in the minds of his dozen-ish friends is also unchanged. The idea of Bill has, however, been introduced to a couple hundred hipster idiots, who now know Bill as the freaky looking homeless dude in that one picture. Has Bill been hurt or diminished at this point? It's not clear to me.
Multiply this by 5 or 6 other hipsters with cameras. Let's suppose Bill's particularly interesting looking, or locally famous for his Journey renditions. A picture of Bill gets into the newspaper, or onto the news. Now Bill's friends, the dozen or so people, have an element of Bill as the-guy-in-that-photo introduced into their minds. Bill has been diminished in a meaningful way at this point. People he knows have a new perception of Bill, and part of that is based on a picture, not on Bill. Bill is smaller. Perhaps Bill prefers being the guy in the picture. Many celebrities, large and small, seem to prefer the image of themselves to the real thing, or at any rate seek to enlarge that shadow reality, that false copy of themselves.
The shadow world of photographs, as I have noted repeatedly, is growing and changing at a furious pace, and I wonder a lot what it all means.
The second kind of thing is abstract, vague, intangible. It's also more important than the first thing. There are deep questions of philosophy and quantum physics which I don't care about and which don't matter here: Whether and how a tree "exists" without the presence of an observer, and how that observer changes and alters its reality I neither know nor particularly care. We can say with confidence that an unobserved tree is not very interesting to anyone, and that's all that matters. The point here is that our personal and societal ideas about objects are what's important, ultimately, precisely because an unobserved object is -- at best -- pretty uninteresting.
You would argue that a giant meteor, as yet unobserved, but aimed to obliterate the Earth is pretty interesting, but I maintain that it's not interesting until we, however briefly, observe its existence.
Let's also take a moment to discard the notion that an image partakes in some literal way in the reality of the thing imaged. Whether true or not, I am not interested here in notions of voodoo, or the idea that a photograph steals ones soul. These are idea that go back a long ways, but in modern society we tend not to believe them (at least not to admit it), and anyways what I am trying to get at is what might underlie such a belief.
A photograph alters, however minutely, our idea of the object photographed. An image might not literally diminish other elements of our idea of the object, but by creating new aspects of that idea it makes the other aspects relatively smaller. Our experience of an actual McDonald's hamburger is a real thing in our mind. Images of that hamburger add to that idea, that mental model of the McDonald's hamburger. While our real experience is not diminished, advertisers can alter our overall attitude by filling our mind with competing images of delicious and desirable hamburgers. The image of the burger grows with each photograph and video, the actual experience diminishes in importance. This is why advertising works.
In this same way our society's understanding of Winston Churchill is largely driven by a single iconic image, the cigar-less portrait made by Karsh. Our relationship with Half-Dome, whether we have seen it or not, is largely defined by Adams photographs and the infinite cloud of copies made by everyone. The Eiffel tower has no particular iconic photograph that I know of, but has certainly been reduced to a postcard in our minds, and is well on its way to becoming a snapshot containing a blurry black object behind a pair of vapidly grinning tourists. Celebrities are featherless bipeds who exist primarily in photographs and videos.
Consider a homeless man named Bill. Bill has, perhaps, a little trouble with beer. Maybe Bill's wife died in a car accident 20 years ago, perhaps Bill knows the lyrics to every Journey song. This is Bill to the dozen or so people who actually know Bill. Now some idiot with a fedora and a Canon 5DII comes along doing some "street photography" and takes a picture of Bill. This picture is over-processed and dumped on to flickr. At this point Bill's actual reality is unchanged. The idea of Bill in the minds of his dozen-ish friends is also unchanged. The idea of Bill has, however, been introduced to a couple hundred hipster idiots, who now know Bill as the freaky looking homeless dude in that one picture. Has Bill been hurt or diminished at this point? It's not clear to me.
Multiply this by 5 or 6 other hipsters with cameras. Let's suppose Bill's particularly interesting looking, or locally famous for his Journey renditions. A picture of Bill gets into the newspaper, or onto the news. Now Bill's friends, the dozen or so people, have an element of Bill as the-guy-in-that-photo introduced into their minds. Bill has been diminished in a meaningful way at this point. People he knows have a new perception of Bill, and part of that is based on a picture, not on Bill. Bill is smaller. Perhaps Bill prefers being the guy in the picture. Many celebrities, large and small, seem to prefer the image of themselves to the real thing, or at any rate seek to enlarge that shadow reality, that false copy of themselves.
The shadow world of photographs, as I have noted repeatedly, is growing and changing at a furious pace, and I wonder a lot what it all means.
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