From Roy DeCarava’s The Sound I Saw:

…

why the present is a crutch of

empty

bottles drowning a derelict past

in surrealistic

confusions that ride the future on

platinum hair

and plywood boxes with cast iron wheels

imperiously

impersonal and impervious to everything

hot and cold

knowing a special ignorance

only

wealth can buy and arrogance sustain

with

petrified abstractions and ambivalent

allusions

to human equations that temporize and

beguile

while money makes money iron

rusts

plaster crumbles and chromium

will peel

…

(Note: once again, sorry for the poor reproduction quality. I still don’t have a suitable book-photographing workflow worked out.)

Roy DeCarava’s The Sound I Saw was composed in the 60’s, but not published until 2001. It consists of photographs and verse on a jazz theme. DeCarava writes, “Everything a jazzman feels, sees, hears, everything he was and is becomes the source and object of his music. It is a music purchased with dues of hardship, suffering and pain, optimism and love.” His book has this aspect about it. It is an inclusive, intimate, and comprehensive exploration of life lived in the context of the time and place and society in which it was made.

It is a kind of phenomenological document on race and class in America. By “phenomenological document,” I mean it is a record of an experience. There must be a better way to put this, but so far I cannot think of one. The value of the photographs in The Sound I Saw is not in objective disclosure of facts, but it is also not in internal exploration, or in the artistic arrangement of documentary “style” photographs to serve an interior vision. These are photographs that, more than any others I can think of, approximate a shared experience of the human gaze.

The eye is not an isolated organ, and it is not a technical instrument. My eye gives me a view that is informed by my knowledge, my experience, my personality, my feelings. The typical Western mindset is to perceive this subjective aspect of experience, which is inextricable even at the base level of sensorium, as a weakness, or at least a potential vulnerability. This assumption is always problematic, but it is an absolute land mine when it comes to understanding issues like race and class, or any other area where society is split up along divisions of power which are also divisions of perceptibility.

So, for those who do not have their own direct experience of the kinds of scene DeCarava is photographing, it is important to approach these photographs in the correct way: not just as historical documents (although many of them are), and not just as artistic works (although all of them are), but also for their truth-disclosing function as regards the subjective experience of race and class, which is not to be confused with opinion or other epistemologically defused modes of communication. There is testimony here, and the reader should be reading for it.

So, that being said, what’s the book actually like? It consists of black and white photographs interspersed with verse. The verse is a single continuous poem (and possibly a continuous sentence) about 2,000 words in length, and it appears to the viewer in chunks and fragments. No fragment stands on its own. Each extends from the last and points to the next, while also relating to the photographs it frames, and so binding the whole book together.

Similarly, the photographs are tied one to the next by composition or content — the angles of a fire escape to the angles of a quartet’s instruments, one pair of clasped hands to another, gazes intersecting across the book’s gutter, gestures, reflections, patterns of light and dark. The images and the text keep time with each other, and together flow through the stage, the street, the hallway, the home, and spiral back and on again.

DeCarava’s arsenal of technique is diverse — style, angle of view, perspective, content — all are flexible and changeable. Soft focus and motion blur are used alongside crisp, perfect detail, each advancing a different visual strategy, each serving the same overall narrative. Strongly stylized and allusive images and utterly straight documentary views support each other seamlessly. The result is organic, contiguous, encompassing work and play, family life and the public space, high and low art, and above all, music and the landscape of race and class.

The Sound I Saw is the best example I have encountered of a photographic sequence. Most sequences fail at either establishing solid photo-to-photo connections, or at producing a satisfying unified work in the sequence as a whole. And text, when provided, usually either serves to cover some gap in the photos’ ability to depict and explain, or else establishes a tenuous bridge between the photographs and some theoretical justification for the sequence — which is more often than not absurd, patronizing, or pandering. The Sound I Saw avoids all these traps.

Part of the reason it is able to do so is that, as I mentioned, it presents to the viewer a record of experience. When looking at the photos that show work, and reading the text that describes work, one feels work — its cost in fatigue, the weight of its necessity, its exertion, its sweat. This experience of work is contiguous across manual labor and the work of musicians performing on stage. DeCarava pays the same kind and degree of attention to the laborer’s tool and the musician’s instrument. And sweat — in The Sound I Saw, sweat takes on a spiritual or religious dimension, almost like a communion:

aching fingers

to rest and drop the two shovels

every member

must use back to back

in time

and in his place of something

less than

good enough to breathe bittersweet

sweat

and the drag gigs that never end

(DeCarava’s depictions of play are equally profound, but I think less singular. Many photographers have done an excellent job of recording children at play, adults caught up in dance, etc. It is less common to see work presented in a way that cuts past our tendency to objectify and to distance ourselves from our experiences of strain and pain.)

Corollary to work is an awareness of the class and racial context in which work takes place, which DeCarava conveys in images of subtle severity. The hand of a man glimpsed in the backseat of a car is minimal, indeed not far from the very edge of recognizability, but elegant and eloquent in the reality it expresses, of the distance between the rich and the rest of us. Equally eloquent are the pale faces of well-dressed men who avoid the camera’s gaze — and the photographer’s gaze, and all that implies.

These things are part of what builds the experience of race into the photographs themselves, and invites the viewer to share in the seeing and the being seen of being a black man in the 60’s. Which is very different from just providing a record of a race-related event or personage, but is no less a true document.

DeCarava’s depictions of the places in which people live and work are just as elegantly and profoundly made. It is difficult to strike a balance between clearly and directly portraying the ruinous situations in which poor people often live and respecting the reality and specificity and dignity of the lives they live. DeCarava does this better than pretty much anyone else. (cf. The Ruinpornomicon)

He also finds the balance between an honest record of the alienation, loathing, and oppression that come with a racist society, and the desire for a more equitable future (“…the hope / light hands in trains will be / hands / dark faces on buses just / faces…”) and also images of people in the present who come together across the color line. In accounting for race — especially race in the 60’s, although unfortunately it is not so different today — it is very easy to wind up with a partial narrative — one defined by anger and bitterness, or by hope. It is harder to simultaneously affirm the reality of both, which is what DeCarava does.

The Sound I Saw is a beautiful and moving and important book. It is a book that I think everyone in America should be expected to read. Certainly it is a book that should be much more prominent than it is within the discourse of documentary and street photography. I find it especially bothersome that we give so much attention to The Americans (a book that is, by comparison, a travelogue: a skimming of the surface of American life) when we could be talking about this instead.

It may not be in print (grr), but you may be able to find it on the remainder table of your local bookstore (grr), and you can certainly find it used online. I cannot recommend strongly enough that you do so.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Simone Weil’s “The Iliad, or, the Poem of Force.”

It’s an essay on the role of force (i.e., coercive violence) in the Iliad — but Weil wrote it in 1939, so she wasn’t just writing about the Iliad. In the essay, she describes the centrality of coercion (in the form of violence, destruction, and enslavement) both to that story and to a recurring historical predicament of human beings in time of war: that the dead and the subjugated exist as things, deprived of the status and condition of human persons.

She wrote:

To define force — it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all.

and later:

From the power to transform him into a thing by killing him there proceeds another power, and much more prodigious, that which makes a thing of him while he still lives. He is living, he has a soul, yet he is a thing.

These passages are often on my mind, because I think they have a lot of relevance for contemporary culture, both literally and figuratively. I think they are disturbingly relevant to reality television, for example. (Reality television is a forum for people who wish to reduce themselves to things as a spectacle for the audience.)

But what I’ve been thinking about lately is the relevance of Weil’s observations to photography in particular — and more specifically, to portraiture, which is the genre of photography most intimately connected to the human person. I wonder: is the portraitist’s camera a case of an “x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing”?

Of course, literally speaking, that is the camera’s very purpose. You point the device at a person, activate it, and receive a thing (the photograph) in return. But does that process, the technical ritual of camera operation, doom the portrait to acting as an objectifying force, each release of the shutter a minor recapitulation of violence? Does it always and necessarily do so, or only sometimes? And can it serve an opposite function?

I don’t have a systematic answer to these questions, but a few examples have occurred to me. I’m not presenting these as a typology, or even a part of one, just engaging in a little free association:

Gardner’s “Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter” is a photograph of a corpse, of a person who has been made into a thing. So, war had already done as much to him as it could, hadn’t it? Or perhaps it had not. The photograph is now generally understood to have been staged — a common practice at the time. If a scene was not sufficiently dramatic, did not tell enough of a story, did not tell the right story, then the scene, including the corpse, could be adjusted as necessary. (Of course, this sort of technique was more often applied to the bodies of those on the other side of a given conflict than to those on ones own.)

The corpse is simply a prop — a significant prop, perhaps, but one as malleable and manipulable as any other. In other words, this is a photograph which not only records the result of violence as content, but which is made in a fashion predicated upon violence and benefiting from it. (Which is so even if the photograph also has the intended or unintended result of eliciting sympathy for the dead.) While the practice of moving bodies around is no longer so prominent in the war photographer’s toolkit, I do not think you would have to look far to find related strategies in use throughout the history of photojournalism, up to today.

In some cases, the process of making or displaying a photograph can in itself be intrinsically and literally harmful or detrimental. An obvious, perfect case would be Marc Garanger’s “Femme Algerienne” photographs — ID photographs made during the Algerian War, for which women were forced to sit with their faces uncovered.

In this case, the camera is being employed as a tool of war, and photography is an application of force against a people, as well as a process producing documents that are records and emblems of subjugation.

These same photographs have acquired new meanings and uses since then, being pressed into service as documentation of the brutality of the regime which required them to be made. They are also displayed as fine art, which I find more than a little creepy, because both their intellectual significance and their very real beauty are still owed directly to the violation that created them.

I’m not sure whether Tyler Shields’s “Bruised Barbie” photographs of Heather Morris are only superficially relevant to this post, or whether they are hyper-relevant to it. No one was harmed in their creation, and they have no direct connection to any specific violent event or deed. But still, there is something about them which prevents me from partitioning them off in the way I might other works of entertainment or art which happened to include some fictionalization of violence.

They depict a woman taking on the role of a plastic doll (i.e., turning herself into a thing), while also depicting a weirdly light, playful, inconsequential idea of violence and subjugation.

Whether that depiction is in itself actually harmful is an interesting question. The kneejerk, commonsense reaction to these photos is that they glamorize domestic violence. I don’t really get that, because I don’t see any actual glamor in the photographs.

But as portraits — as photographs of a person — I find them baffling and off-putting. They are technically photographs of a person, but what I see in them is not a person — not even a person pretending to be a plastic toy. What I see in them is, “nobody is here at all.”

Fazal Sheikh’s portraiture is also hyper-relevant to this post, although in a different way. It seems to be more or less a direct response to the sort of effects of violence that Weil describes. Eduardo Cadava’s essay on Sheikh explains it this way:

In presenting us the traces of violence, deprivation, oppression, and effacement in relation to which his subjects exist — in relation to which they live and die, and even live as if they already were dead — Sheikh’s photographs seek to bestow a kind of life and dignity on these men, women, and children, to attest to the necessity and responsibility of producing photographs that might facilitate this life and dignity, that may even speak and be heard. (p. 9)

In describing this (possible) function of photography, Cadava emphasizes the importance of context — of the way the portrait, and especially the photographic series, can document and/or connote relationship between the subject and their environment.

Each portrait, in other words, opens onto a world: it tells us that, if we wish to see this or that refugee, to understand his or her plight, we can only begin to “see” him or her by understanding his or her relation to an entire network of intensely mediated relations. We could even say that photography names the process whereby something stops being what it “is” in order to transform itself into “something else.” This transformation therefore implies a kind of death — since what existed before the transformation is no longer present — and it is no accident that Sheikh intersperses, among his images of Somali refugees, a series of photographs of graves…each of which could be said to be a “portrait,” but a portrait that tells us what is true of all portraits: a portrait is always less “the immortalization of a person than the presentation of (immortal) death in (a) person.” (pp. 20-21)

I find this interesting because it returns me to another passage in Weil’s essay:

But for those upon whom it has fallen, so brutal a destiny wipes out damnations, revolts, comparisons, meditations upon the future and the past, almost memory itself. It does not belong to the slave to be faithful to his city or to his dead.

Weil identifies this decontextualizing capacity of violence as central to the experience of the subjugated victim. The dead are not only taken away, but in a sense erased. And while a photographic record has no power to resuscitate the dead, perhaps it has (or may have) the power to frustrate this kind of erasure.

In other words, the photograph cannot remove or reverse death, it cannot add life — but it can act as a sort of “death plus,” contributing an additional virtual death that happens to confer a kind of immortality. Cadava indicates that this function is connected to the subject’s community — so perhaps the measure of the worth of a photograph in relation to violence is the extent to which it enables the viewer to place the results/evidence of that violence into context, to perceive it as it relates the subject to other people and to the subject’s past and place.

Of course, enabling the viewer to relate to the subject historically and in context does not necessarily differentiate Sheikh’s portraits from Gardner’s rebel sharpshooter. After all, what we may believe Sheikh achieves in enabling subjects to “speak and be heard,” cannot always be differentiated from what enables another sort of photographer to use the subject to lie.

Self-Portrait, Gordon Parks. Via artnet.

Earlier this month, I attended a talk related to a project called CHROMA, which is intended to foster “pluralism within the field of photography and lens-based media by supporting the work of emerging artists of African, Latino, Native American, Middle Eastern, North African, Asian, and Pacific Island heritage.”

The conversation tended strongly toward academic/fine arts inside baseball. Not surprising, considering the venue and audience — but not really our beat. However, something that came up in the question and answer period struck me as interesting and within the 1/125 remit:

One of the audience members was worried about changes related to ephemera (like written correspondence) and the impact of those changes on biography in the arts. What, if anything, will take the place of letters in providing biographical detail about the artists of our time? Are emails and tweets likely to be preserved in a way that will be usable for future biographers?

I expected the ensuing discussion to be either a stultifying technical speculation on digital archiving, or else a dirge for old media. But the response from Deborah Willis went in a different direction.

She talked about the upcoming Centennial of Gordon Parks’s birth, and about researching an article she was asked to write about him. She said that Parks wrote five memoirs — which seems like a rather excessive number for anyone. But Willis pointed out that while Parks wrote extensively about himself, few other writers have done so. It seems biographical work on him is scarce, and Parks is missing from a number of recent works which survey documentary photography and photojournalism. (Which seems crazy.)

Willis said, “If Gordon hadn’t written his stories, no one would know he existed,” and so, “My suggestion to you as an artist is: start writing your story.”

“Jaco, Beaufort West Prison, 2006.” from Beaufort West, Mikhael Subotzky, p. 72.

Mikhael Subotzky’s Beaufort West is a book about a town built around a prison. Literally — the prison is located in a traffic circle in the middle of the town. Subotzky states, “The image of the town radiating out of the prison was what really drew me to work there.” (p. 78) This is illustrated with the aerial photo that opens the book, which shows how the town’s streets do indeed appear to radiate outward from the circular grounds of the prison.

But while the town of Beaufort West radiates out of the prison, this aerial view is not the central one in the book, Beaufort West. The photograph out of which the book could be said to radiate is the one I’ve included at the top of this post. Subotzky describes this image as follows:

This is Jaco sleeping in the exercise yard of the prison. It was Jaco who painted the massive mural there, with the help of the other prisoners. And it was their idea — this idyllic image of the landscape outside the prison, painted on its inner walls. It is very much a Karoo landscape, a Beaufort West landscape, un-peopled but with animals and beautiful trees and hills. The prison has now had it painted over as part of their recent renovations. (p. 79)

It would be easy for me to brush past this photograph. Growing up in the Bay Area, one tends to become quite desensitized to murals. At this point, I’m more likely to have an emotional or intellectual response to a blank wall than to one that has something painted on it.

But there’s a passage in the included essay by Jonny Steinberg that caused me to go back and re-examine this photograph, and to a lesser extent the whole rest of the book. Steinberg writes:

It is not just that the Karoo landscape in [Subotzky’s] pictures is inhabited. It is that the landscape is so patently a backdrop to the imaginings of the people in the photographs. They are using it: to transport themselves, to elevate themselves, to re-describe themselves. In picturing them Subotzky does more than simply stitch the desert and the people back together. He takes us on a sometimes disquieting adventure, asking us to imagine how the desert is imagined by those who live there.

Almost every photograph carries a suggestion of theatre, and almost every theatre uses the desert as it stage. The boy on the rubbish heap who has donned the Spider-Man mask he found in the trash; the children launching the white sheet into the wind; the screaming man and the princess on their manicured horses; the white girl with the competition tag and high heels on the black-floored stage, posing for an audience off-camera; the snake and the elephant staring so very sweetly at the ill man on the bed; the prisoner lying beneath a massive mural of cacti and sand and stone, like a giant bubble representing the inside of his mind. (p. 75)

Steinberg applies this interpretation of Subotzky’s photographs more liberally than I would. I do not see the desert on the beauty pageant’s black stage, for example, and many of the photographs seem to me to be conspicuously devoid of imagination, almost as though there were an imagination shortage. Or as though imagination were a luxury good which not all could afford. But the reading does apply very well to the photograph of Jaco, which records a creative act that imposes an imagined (but not hypothetical) transparency upon the opaque walls of the prison. The photograph also invites the viewer to participate in the imagining, which is an essential aspect that I more or less missed on my first viewing.

Whether or not I agree precisely with Steinberg’s explanation of the place/function of imagination in Beaufort West, I think he is right about the centrality of it, and this is something that distinguishes the best of Subotzky’s photographs in Beaufort West from a lot of good but unremarkable documentary photography: they document a place both as it is and as it is imagined.

When this clicked for me, my mind immediately leapt to two books that are (superficially) unrelated both to each other and to Beaufort West, but which are relevant to this question of imagining a place. The first is the graphic novel Scalped by Jason Aaron and RM Guera; the second is Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Reverie.

For those who are not familiar, Scalped is a series of mostly crime noir stories set on a South Dakota reservation. Part of what makes Scalped so powerful — in contrast to more literal depictions of Native American life — is the fact that it is a work of imagination. It deals in dream and memory, and both the prose and art are dramatic and stylized. And some of the images in it have a strength and power and emotional penetration to them that real depictions of struggle and suffering often do not.

The imagined landscape both creates a counterpoint to the realities depicted in it and establishes a precondition or basis for fully confronting them. Getting past the mere facts which we already assume and take for granted to get to the reality of another person’s human suffering does, after all, involve an act of the imagination. (As Frantz Fanon put it, one must try “to feel himself into the despair of another person.” (Black Skin, White Masks, p. 86))

Bachelard’s Poetics of Reverie is somewhat harder to explain. Let’s just say that it has to do with the nature of knowledge and experience, and with daydreams, and that it is very French. Here is the bit that struck me as relevant:

Upon being faced with a real world, one can discover in himself the being of worry. Then he is thrown into the world, delivered over to the inhumanity and the negativeness of the world, and the world is then the denial of the human. The demands of our reality function require that we adapt to reality and that we manufacture works which are realities. But doesn’t reverie, by its very essence, liberate us from the reality function? From the moment it is considered in all its simplicity, it is perfectly evident that reverie bears witness to a normal, useful irreality function which keeps the human psyche on the fringe of all the brutality of a hostile and foreign non-self.

There are times in the life of a poet when reverie assimilates even the real. Then, what he perceives is assimilated. The real world is absorbed by the imaginary world. Shelley gives us a veritable phenomenological theorem when he says that imagination is capable of “making us create what we see.” (p. 13)

It is easy to see the prisoners’ mural at Beaufort West as an expression and a depiction of reverie (in Bachelard’s sense). It is a dreamy-looking work that appears to us, as Steinberg points out, as though it were a thought bubble floating over the head of the sleeping Jaco. And I think it is not at all difficult to see the way Jaco’s mural or Samuel’s Spider-Man mask can reflect what Bachelard calls the irreality function, in relation to what other photographs in the book show to be a brutal and hostile reality.*

* I am being somewhat free with Bachelard. The quoted passage is about understanding the inside of an experience; using it to classify recorded objects is something of a leap.

But as I mentioned earlier, I am not sure that this imaginative reading of Subotzky’s work stretches as far as Steinberg thinks it does. The imaginative quality is not pervasive or consistent in the book; it characterizes some images strongly, but others weakly or not at all.

I am also not sure about the nature of the imagining itself. To what extent is Steinberg correct in describing it as the subjects’ self-imagining, and to what extent are the subjects serving as fodder for the photographer’s imagination, or the viewer’s? Some of the photographs seem to be less about the subjects dreaming themselves into their own landscape and more about the photographer discovering a surreal playground of imagery, and reveling in the enigmatic drama of it. These photographs — such as the shop with the mannequins, or the museum’s operating room display — seem more self-indulgent and less revelatory, for all that they are striking and compelling images. They are good photographs, but it is possible that they diminish Beaufort West as a book. At the least, I think they place an asterisk on Steinberg’s reading of Subotzky’s work.

Also, my thoughts about the book keep returning to something I mentioned earlier: the idea of imagination as a scarce resource inequitably distributed. Who gets to imagine, on what terms, in what media? Who controls the means of expressing and recording imagination? More to the point, when we try to answer those questions, to what extent do we end up taking the measure of things in the town of Beaufort West, and to what extent do we just take the measure of Subotzky’s work in the book, Beaufort West?

There is a related — or at least, I think it is related — issue of the enigmatic. It seems to me that some people in Beaufort West are permitted to be more enigmatic than others, to have more privacy, to be more unrevealed. This has partly to do with real conditions — people who live in houses always have more privacy than those who live in prisons — but it also has to do with how the photographer pursues his project. We see in great detail — perhaps even to the point of exploitation or voyeurism — the private lives of some people, while with others we see only the public surface. This does not seem to break down along the lines of who is interesting and who is not interesting, but more along lines of class and race.

This is not to say that it is racist for the book to contain too little documentation of white people, of course — but there is something about the relationship between how different segments of the community are represented which I think warrants some further scrutiny. At a minimum, the question of which folks’ private lives can be left as an exercise to the reader, and which require extensive (even intrusive) scrutiny, gives an indication of the perspective which the book assumes for the viewer — a perspective which I think is not without problems if we try to read the book in the way Steinberg suggests.

In closing, I should point out a couple of meta-concerns you should have about these concerns I have about Beaufort West: First, I am strongly influenced by Steinberg’s essay, but I am not sure how fair it is to take that interpretation as the primary one in approaching Subotzky’s photographs. Second, this book is about a town I know nothing about, in a nation I know nothing about, on a continent I know nothing about. Some of the relevant issues are universal, or at least transcend geography — but many are specific, I’m sure, and not all of those specifics can be worked out contextually. You should bear this in mind when evaluating what I’ve written about Beaufort West, and I’d love to hear from anyone who does have more knowledge about this part of the world, and anyone who has a different read on Subotzky’s photographs.

“Any schoolboy or girl can make good pictures with one of the Eastman Kodak Company’s No.2 Brownie cameras.” — Kodak ad from The Youth’s Companion. April 29, 1902. At brownie-camera.com, via @vossbrink.

In my feed reader yesterday, I came across this question:

If everybody can be a photographer, what will be the function of a professional?

at Foam. (via Conscientious.) The question is part of “What’s Next: A Search into the Future of Photography.

Note: Judging by the comments, it looks like it was posted about 3 months ago. Not sure, though. Trying to make sense of the content buried in Foam’s web design is like trying to have a conversation with three really enthusiastic schizophrenic hobos.

It is a question that is voiced often, although much of the time it is phrased as a lamentation rather than as a question. Usually it is raised in reference to the availability of portable, highly automated digital cameras and cameraphones; it is often also coupled to one or more of the following:

• Professional against amateur ranting
• Aspiring professional against amateur ranting
• Ranting among aspiring professionals who consider themselves more professional than other aspiring professionals
• Professional against client ranting

In all of these forms, the question demonstrates the peculiar blindness which many photographers cultivate in reference to the history of their own medium. It is a question that fails what I have decided to call “The 1978 Test.”

The 1978 test is very, very simple. You fail it by presenting as novel a question which John Szarkowski addressed in Mirrors and Windows in 1978:

Portraits, wedding pictures, scenic views, product photographs, PR photos, architectural views, insurance-claim documents, and a score of similar vernacular functions that were once thought to require the special skills of a professional photographer are now increasingly being performed by naive amateurs with sophisticated cameras. Although for the most part these pictures are approximate and graceless, they answer adequately the simple problem of identifying a given face, setting, product, building, accident, or ritual handshake. (Szarkowski, Mirrors and Windows, p. 14)

There is no significant difference between Szarkowski’s observation of this situation in 1978 and anyone’s proclamation today that “now everyone can be a photographer.”

The digital photography market is a natural extension of the 35mm/APS film market (easy-to-use cameras for consumers, sophisticated system cameras for enthusiasts/professionals). There is a difference in degree of adoption, but I see no reason to identify the present as the watershed. If the status of the professional photographer was killed by technology, it was done by the Minolta X-100 or the Nikon FA. The iPhone is just pissing on the grave.

(By the way, it is important to understand that Szarkowski did not just observe the situation, though — he also observed and reported the effects of shared awareness of that situation on the work of contemporary professional photographers.)

So you see that the Foam question, “If everybody can be a photographer, what will be the function of a professional?” is an excellent example of how to fail the test. It’s hardly the only one, however. The very best fail-with-flying-colors recent example is this paragraph in a LightBox post quoting Elisabeth Biondi:

“There are no more discoveries to be made,” Elisabeth Biondi tells me on the opening night of the fourth annual New York Photo Festival. “Anyone can take a picture now, so it’s forced documentary photographers to have a more personalized vision.”

Note: Since I don’t have the context, I don’t know whether the it is Biondi or the LightBox writer who gets credit for this 1978 Fail.

This is more or less a summary of Szarkowski’s basic thesis in Mirrors and Windows, which in large part was devoted to explaining why documentary photographers were turning their inquiries more and more upon themselves.

But Szarkowski was describing a change that had been ongoing since the 60’s, and that was already embodied in the work being produced throughout that decade and the 70’s.

So the “now” in Biondi’s “anyone can take a picture now,” is either a “now” that recapitulates the situation of the 60’s and 70’s, or else a “now” that has been stretched over half a century or more by photographers’ persistent elected ignorance of the history of their own medium.

“Anyone can take a picture now,” “everybody can be a photographer,” has been the condition of the medium of photography for a very long time. It has been advertised at least as far back as the first Kodak cameras, and it has been lamented at least as far back as the time when dry glass plates were introduced. And indeed, the invention and popularization of photography itself in the beginning was largely fueled by a desire to make picture-making available to those who lacked the talent and/or time to become skilled painters.

(Of course, this leaves out the question of the socioeconomic resources required to own and operate camera equipment. That is an area where there has been some interesting change over time, and the changes in the last decade or so may indeed be more radical than the changes that occurred over the prior century. However no one is (consciously) talking about that when they invoke “anyone can take a picture now,” so it has no impact on their failure of The 1978 Test.)

But there is an additional dimension to failing The 1978 Test, which is that the great mass of often unjustified enthusiasm and anxiety surrounding the advent of digital everything leads us to focus far too much on the role of equipment, techniques, procedures, and the technical look of photographs.

As Szarkowski wrote:

During the first century of his existence, the professional photographer performed a role similar to that of the ancient scribe, who put in writing such messages and documents as the illiterate commoner and his often semiliterate ruler required. Where literacy became the rule, the scribe disappeared. By 1936, when Moholy-Nagy delcared that photography was the lingua franca of our time, and that the illiterate of the future would be he who could not use a camera, the role of the professional photographer was already greatly diminished from the days in which his craft was considered a skill close to magic. Today it is only in a few esoteric branches of scientific or technical work that a photographer can still claim mysterious secrets. (Szarkowski, Mirrors and Windows, p. 14)

Photography is literacy. It was destined (or doomed) to become so, to become as ubiquitous, and as debased, as the practice of putting words onto paper or onto screens. It means as little, or as much.

At the end of his post, Colberg said, “Isn’t it funny that you never hear writers worry about the fact that everybody knows how to write?”

The thing is, “photographer” isn’t analogous to “writer” in the sense that we use “writer” today. A “writer” is someone who is good at putting ideas and perceptions into words that are useful, important, educational, etc. (And Colberg was speaking more specifically about novelists, essayists, etc. — people whose job is to produce good, enjoyable, important writing.)

The word “photographer” is sometimes used to refer to comparable functions within photography. However it is often — maybe even usually — used to refer to people who perform work analogous to that of scribes. And apart from highly specialized people like notaries, court reporters, and calligraphers, almost nothing remains of that occupation in industrialized countries, because we no longer have a need for them, because most of us are at least semi-literate.

That role — the photographic scribe — is dying. Of course it is, and it should. And it has been doing so for a very long time. And if you don’t understand that…well, you fail The 1978 Test.

UPDATE: I’m really enjoying the discussion in the comments — I’ll try to put together a “featured comments” update for this post at some point, but for now, I just want to point out that several commenters have pointed out something that I didn’t address above, which is that the distribution of photography has undergone a change in recent years that is significantly more radical than the rate of change in prior decades. I agree with this, and I think that “Everyone is now a publisher — what does that mean for traditional publishers/publications and for photographers,” is a valid and interesting question that belongs to the present and future of photography, and is not a carryover in the way that “Everyone is now a photographer…” is.

UPDATE 2: I pulled a snippet (“Making their photographs mirrors.”) out of the post in response to Andre’s comment. I need to check my copy of Mirrors and Windows to confirm, but I believe he’s right that I flipped Szarkowski’s thesis around. It’s not actually relevant to the main thrust of the post, FWIW, but certainly if I’m going to chastise people for not reading Szarkowski, I should try to report his text accurately. : )

“The annual banquet. Los Angeles. April 17, 2010,” by Julie Platner. Via nytimes.com.

I started following the Lens blog at nytimes.com after it was suggested in the comments on my post about literary vs. unliterary photography. Most of the stories I’ve encountered at Lens since then have been fairly uninteresting — a mix of straight photojournalism and fluff.

I’m not sure yet whether this piece about photographer Julie Platner’s work documenting white supremacists — the death of one of her subjects being the occasion of the post — is really any better than all those other posts. It’s basically a hash combining news coverage of the event with bits of Platner’s resume. But the subject matter is certainly compelling.

Hate groups are a fascinating subject. To someone like me — a person of mixed race, raised in diverse urban areas — they have a distinctly fantastic quality to them. They are a sort of boogeyman or storybook monster. They are scary and loathsome, but it is hard to escape the emotional certainty that they belong to a different time or a different world, or both.

This is not to say that I am unfamiliar with hate and bigotry, or that I do not understand their reality — just that I am accustomed to encountering them in different forms. I am used to seeing overt, hard-core racism go consistently (if sometimes thinly) veiled, except among the deranged and the drunk. The idea of it organizing, holding bake sales, and attending conventions is bizarre and strongly counterintuitive. The outfits don’t help, either; I can’t resist the urge to read them as cosplay.

Is that wrong? I am not sure. On the one hand, it would be a clear error not to consider these people (especially the cosplayers) foolish; on the other hand, it would be a mistake to take lightly the capacity of fools to do evil. And the question for our purposes is not only whether or not we are to take these people seriously, but also whether or not a photojournalist documenting them has a responsibility to guide us in our perception of them, and, if so, what that responsibility entails.

The Times writers seem to be confused about this as well. They seem to weave back and forth between humanizing and demonizing them. The humanizing elements seem to arise partly from journalistic habits, and partly from bemusement or novelty — as though the fact that these are people with feelings and families was somehow the real news.

Platner’s photographs are similarly ambivalent, although they are more interesting and perhaps more nuanced. Instead of humanizing and demonizing, I would say that they militarize and domesticate — roughly half of them record what is obviously aspiring to be a paramilitary organization, and the other half record families and communities going about a superficially normal (if regalia-heavy) pageant of civic life.

Many of the photographs — especially those in the second category — are surprisingly funny, putting me in mind of @vossbrink’s suggestion/speculation that “photography’s natural state is of mocking its subjects.” In this case, the question is how these photographs mock, and what that mocking means. Humor can serve many different functions in relationship to its objects. It can deprive horrible things of some of their power, for example. It can reveal uncomfortable truths and make it easier for us to face them. It can simply take the edge off of our anger or fear.

I don’t know that Platner’s photographs do any of those things. They put me in mind more of Martin Parr or Lars Tunbjork. Except that those photographers hold up a teasing or satirical mirror to normally unquestioned mainstream lives, whereas Platner is applying a similar playful, teasing aesthetic to angry, potentially violent people whom the mainstream already refuses to take seriously. It seems peculiarly out of place — except in the photographs that include children and young people, where the light-heartedness of the depictions underscores the ugly, heavy, bitter fact that childhoods are being warped in service of adult hatreds.

It’s interesting to compare Platner’s photographs to Bruce Gilden’s series for Newsweek last year. Both projects refer to two key factors in the contemporary relevance of white supremacist groups: the poor economy and the election of Barack Obama. The photographs are also similar in content, depicting substantially the same sorts of people in the same sorts of situation — except that Gilden’s does not cover the more militant situations that Platner does. There is even some overlap in the kind of humor they use.

What differentiates Gilden’s photographs are their black and white rendition, their close perspective, and their systematic framing of people as subjects, where Platner depicts scenes and situations. The resulting difference in overall tone is surprisingly significant — at least, I feel very different when I look at them. Gilden’s photos imply personal judgment to me, partly his judgment of the people he depicts, and partly an invitation to make my own judgments about them. Where they are funny, Gilden’s photos seem to me to imply a laughter that diminishes. Looking at them, I feel much larger, and I feel the supremacists to be smaller.

If this were almost any other subject matter, I would present those observations as clear evidence that Gilden’s approach is problematic compared to Platner’s. In this case, I am honestly unsure.

From Being Gay in Uganda, by Tadej Žnidarčič. Via Daylight Magazine.

Before you read our post, I recommend reading the interview at Daylight — it is informative, insightful, and direct. Discussions of work like this often get bogged down either in heavy theory or in a whole-hearted devotion to the documentary value that takes the nature of the photographs and the choices that shaped them as a given; neither is the case here.

In Being Gay in Uganda, Žnidarčič photographs gays and lesbians in Uganda. All of the photographs are posed in the same way, with the subjects facing away from the camera and toward walls, visible from around mid-thigh or knee up.

The photographer explains the choice of posing:

All the people I talked to wanted to remain anonymous so I portrayed them without compromising their safety. I didn’t want to ‘reduce’ them to only their feet, hands or clothing, or hide their faces in one way or another. In this case, I think showing only their hands or clothing wouldn’t say much about them and the situation they face every day. Since we see the ‘complete’ person, but the person is not facing us, the question arises: why can’t they show their face? Why can’t they face us? That’s what I would like people to think about when they see these images.

Another element is that they stand in front of ugly, crumbling walls. These walls symbolize the obstacles they face and their exclusion from society. That, and since the bill proposes the death penalty for homosexuals, a wall is something people get executed in front of. As a series, the portraits work as a group—unified by exact framing—in which each person is an individual, with his or her own posture, clothing, and accessories.

It is an interesting set of choices, addressing the strictly practical need to preserve subjects’ safety, the portraitist’s need to depict whole persons, rather than just parts that elude to a person, and also a symbolic function that the casual viewer might miss: the background as place of execution. (I confess, I did not initially make this connection when viewing the images.)

There are other consequences for these choices, which may or may not also be intended. The posing and framing are profoundly isolating, for example; the subject is cut off from the viewer by the pose and from the context by the framing. This is consistent with what the photographer is trying to communicate about the place of the homosexual in Uganda, but it does not hint at personal bonds, social networks, and organizations within the gay community (which exist and are referenced repeatedly in the interview); each subject stands alone.

I think this approach encourages a more typological and less personal viewing. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that, per se, but I wonder if the choice to represent one person against each wall, rather than two or several, was conscious and what governed it.

On the 8th, I posted a question:

When you look at a photograph, what questions do you ask about it? What steps do you take in the process of making a judgment about the photograph, or in deciding how you feel about it? What happens in the time between when you first see the photograph and when you decide whether or not it is interesting to you?

I received some interesting responses. By far my favorite was @vossbrink’s reply on twitter: “Does it match my sofa?”

He also posted a longer response at his blog. Do read it. He raises an important point about the context-sensitivity of the degree and kind of question the viewer brings to the photograph — i.e., “that I’ve chosen to visit the museum means I’ve committed to looking,” but the same does not apply to perusing photo blogs. And in the latter context, the fundamental question is: “is this worth my time?”

Simen and JasonSMoore point out that as viewers we don’t necessarily “decide how we feel,” as I put it; we have our feelings and then we rationalize those feelings after the fact. I think this is often but not always the case. Often I’ll have a given initial stance toward a photograph, but sometimes I’ll see a photograph and look at it for a long while before I can decide anything at all about it, including whether or not it is worth looking at.

Ault talks about an experience that I’m sure is inevitable for most photographers: “When I really look at a photograph, I can’t help but view it from a photographer’s viewpoint.” For me, this is both a blessing and a curse: on the one hand, having an understanding of what goes into making a photograph enables one to pick up on a lot that a lay viewer (or even a viewer with an academic or at background but no practical experience) may miss; but, on the other hand, it tends to make it easy for me to get caught up in minutiae. When all I can think about is how a scene was lit or whether or not a view camera was necessary to make a photograph, it’s easy for me to miss more central questions.

AG De Mesa suggests a useful distinction between categories of question: technical, emotional (“what does the photograph make me feel”), and intellectual (“what does the academe or the so called ‘Art World’ say about this photograph.”). He also points out that really engaging with a photograph may require active research and that research may take time.

This is an important point, and it raises further questions, such as: how do you judge when research is called for? How do you decide when it is worthwhile to do that research? What sort of research do you do? How deep do you go? How do you know when you know “enough”?

I’ve also been working on a response of my own. I reflected on what has gone through my mind when I’ve looked at various photographs, and what sort of questions I’ve tried to answer for myself about them, what ad hoc procedures I’ve applied to them. I set aside the big-picture questions (like, “is it worth my time,” or “is it interesting,” or “is it good”), and tried to pin down the questions that I might have to go through to get to the point where I could answer those big-picture questions. More specifically, I tried to find questions which are likely to have specific answers, at least some of the time.

Here are some, in no special order:

• What is the emotional state of each person in the photograph?
• What is the emotional state of the photographer?
• How big is the photo?
• What is the path my eye follows as I look at the photograph?
• List the contents of the photograph in order of apparent size
• List the contents of the photograph in order of light to dark tonal value
• What are the race, economic status, gender, and relationships of the subjects in the photograph?
• What’s just outside the frame?
• When was the photo made?
• What are the characteristics of the medium /in/by which the photograph is presented?
• What symbols appear in the image?
• Where do the gaze lines of the subjects point?
• How long did it take to make the photograph?
• How far away was the photographer from the subject?
• What is the attitude of the photograph toward the subject?
• For what feeling is the photograph an equivalent?
• What is the photograph’s market?
• Is the current use of the photograph different from it’s original or intended use?
• Attempt to look at the photograph, without thinking about it, for thirty seconds.
• What is the genre of the photograph?
• Is the photograph typical or atypical of its genre?
• Draw the lines or shapes that are important to the photograph’s composition.
• How much time passed between the photograph being made and this medium being prepared?
• Who determined the sequence?
• How long is the sequence?
• Where in the sequence does this photograph fall?
• Compare the photograph to other photographs in the sequence.
• What is the sense of place in the photograph?
• Does the photograph expand my knowledge of what is depicted?
• Does the photograph expand my understanding of what is depicted?
• What have I previously heard or read about the photograph or series?
• What have I have previously heard or read about the photographer?
• Check Amazon to see what books by the photographer are in print
• Google the photograph
• Google the photographer
• Google the subject
• Google the location
• Check my bookmarks for related links.
• Search my notes for related content.
• Read posts I’ve written before about this photographer or related topics.
• Ask other people what they think.
• (As a follow-up to any of the above questions:) How does that influence the way I see and understand this photograph?

Of course, in practice, for any given photograph, I will probably only actually raise two or three of these questions. I’m not sure to what extent this reflects the inherent diversity of the medium, and to what extent it reflects the limitations of my attention span. Nor could I tell you honestly that there’s any kind of method to the process by which I determine what questions are interesting for what photographs.

Hi, folks. I have a question for you — that is, for anyone who looks at photographs and also writes or talks or thinks about them.

When you look at a photograph, what questions do you ask about it? What steps do you take in the process of making a judgment about the photograph, or in deciding how you feel about it? What happens in the time between when you first see the photograph and when you decide whether or not it is interesting to you?

Hey, folks. You likely already know that Karl and I are active on twitter at @kalli and @kukkurovaca, respectively. But those are personal accounts, and are correspondingly full of dick jokes, video games, and bacon. As they should be.

So, we’ve got an account set up to act as a companion to 1/125: @one250. Get it? Because tweets are short, and 1/250 is a faster shutter speed? And also because @one125 was taken.

We see a ton of images and blog posts that catch our attention, and would be great material for a post here. However, because of the way we approach writing for 1/125 (i.e., we try to be thoughtful), and because we aren’t full-time bloggers, we can’t post about every fascinating thing we see, and when we do write a post here, it takes time. So, stuff goes into my pinboard account immediately and then maybe 2% of that gets turned into a full 1/125 post days or weeks later.

The intention for @1/250 is to give us a place to quickly link to some of that material we’re seeing and taking note of, but not necessarily ready to write whole paragraphs on yet. If that seems like something you’d find useful, please follow the account.