But there is no such thing as a simple document; even a birth certificate embodies cultural values and assumptions, requires interpretation….

Facts seldom speak for themselves; they acquire a voice by being placed in relation to other facts. The sequence of photographs in this book describes what certain places and events look like; it also suggests what they might mean. The meaning arises as much from what happens between photographs as from what happens in them. To be satisfying, the meanings that are created must be coherent, or else understanding is frustrated; but they must also have some of the complexity and contradictoriness of lived experience, or else credibility is strained.

— Frank Gohlke, “Oil,” 1982. In Thoughts on Landscape.

I think this is an extremely elegant response to the same sort of predicament Walker Evans was addressing in a quotation we posted recently.

I particularly like the notion that “complexity and contradictoriness” are essential to “credibility.” I think it’s an important point — part of what makes “straight” photography effective is that it cannot help being at least a little messy — complicated, self-contradictory, uncertain, unexpected, out of control, incomplete.

Not all of these qualities are in every straight photograph, and not every straight photographer is defined principally by these characteristics…but a body of work which is free of these qualities, which is neat and clean and focused entirely on coherent meanings and messages which the photographer-as-artist is putting in front of the viewer, does not generally have a sense of reality about it. Such photography is not necessarily inferior because of that disconnection from reality, but I think it is really a whole different art — or trade, if you prefer Lange’s terminology.