Thank you Prateek, David, Ray, Martin and Stuart for your varied responses. With each I am tempted to take the blog in a different direction; but that might take promiscuity a little too far!
The question of ‘theory’ comes up, in different ways, in the responses of both David and Stuart, and I found David’s notion of the blurring of lines between theory and literature, especially in the way Phillips reads Freud and Winnicott, particularly alluring and useful. I have always found Barthes’s Lover’s Discourse and Incidents more inspiring than Camera Lucida, for photographers as well as writers on photography – and inspiring in a more oblique, tangential way. (They could be read as Barthes’s great ballads of sexual dependency.) Also, I find as a writer (and curator), Camera Lucida’s focus on the single image less interesting than the way the other two books weave moments and fragments together into, not a single or linear narrative, but something richer and stranger. With this art of sequencing, it is possible to take photography beyond the (rather overworked) “decisive moment”, towards a fuller experience of time’s breaks and flows. Yet, in being potentially inspiring for photographers, these books don’t become photographic ‘theory’. They remain pieces of imaginative, reflective and elegiac writing that might work their way into the mind’s eye and, more crucially, the “eye’s mind” (Bridget Riley’s phrase) through the acts of reading and reflection, neither of which is essentially an academic or theory-driven activity that is somehow inimical to the photographer’s Venus-fly-trap ‘instinct’ for capture.
According to my original plan, I wanted to discuss today a short story that is, to my mind, the most inclusive ‘theory’ of photography that I have read so far. But I want to postpone that for the next instalment, for the sake of two, more immediate, issues that I wish to put before you. Both arise from the responses to this blog and from my recent, and first, experience of curating, and thus presenting to the public, an artist’s photographic work.
I woke up this morning with a line from John Donne (promiscuity at its wittiest) going round and round in my head like a dream residue: “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love…” I want to steal this line and turn it into what the photographer might say to the writer: “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me shoot…” Or what the viewer of photography might say to the writer: “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me look…”
I say this because I have noticed an almost knee-jerk resistance to words in a significant proportion of “photography people” all over the world. It is as if, with the admission of photography into the world of “art”, it, more than any other medium, needs specially to be protected from the pernicious and paralysing effect of words, because words “murder to dissect”. The two photographers I have worked with closely as a writer are both deeply inspired by literature, especially poetry and fiction. And whenever I have had public conversations with them about their work and about their sources of inspiration, and one of them has mentioned Calvino and Sebald, or the other Dostoevsky and Cioran, large sections of the public have found it obscurely objectionable that into the paradise of something as ‘spontaneous’, ‘instinctive’ and ‘immediate’ as photography, the serpent of thought, language and – dread word! – theory has been let in. It is as if photography, as an essentially counter-intellectual activity, has to be shielded from the meddlesomeness of the critical, compulsively articulate mind. I do not see this resistance in any of the other arts, and the whole thing puzzles me and interests me. After all, even what we call ‘instinct’ is not just a momentary, unthinking eruption of creative action, but the convergence of several faculties, each with its own, slow history of nourishment and growth. It might all happen in a fraction of a second, but into that fraction of a second dovetails an entire lifetime of discipline, learning, reflection and inspiration.
And this resistance to words – someone put it to me once as “all this Conceptualist stuff” – goes hand in hand with an enduring, and often rather monomaniacal, interest in the photographer’s “process” – in most cases process understood in a narrowly material, technological, mechanical sense, concerning type of camera, lenses, shutter speed, exposure, nature of film, etc. Art reviewers, for instance, feel that photographers are particularly accountable to their viewers in declaring how they have made their work, more than, say, writers, painters or sculptors are. In interviews or in the questionnaires they email to photographers, curators or gallerists, most of the questions are about this aspect of process rather than about what the work is saying or showing, the product, the finished images. Nor is there much interest in the other kind of process – what kinds of living, thinking, reading, listening or viewing have gone into the work and shaped its form and substance. And, further, this interest in process – in how the work is physically made – is expressed for the sake of “demystifying” art: it’s not that big a deal to make a photographic image, so why turn it into such a complex mystery, or so the argument goes in favour of demystification. Again, it is photography, seen as the most democratic of aesthetic media, that is considered to be particularly committed to accessibility, to disclosing and declaring the secrets of its trade – and these secrets are seen more often as technical ones, matters of skill, rather than emanating from an inner life of creativity, influence and thought.
I think these twinned syndromes have something to do with the ‘Theory versus Instinct’ motif that has emerged in this blog. They may also have to do with how we segregate what we consider to be academic and theoretical from what we value as the immediate and the creative, how we try to protect experience from words – a form of segregation that needs to be revisited and thought through again in the light of photography.
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I want to include in each instalment a poem and a film clip that have helped me respond to, and think about, photography in some way, most often indirectly and mysteriously, and have therefore become part of my homespun ‘theory’ of photography even if they haven’t mentioned photography at all. Here are the first two. To some the poem will be disappointingly familiar. But it touches upon so many of the unresolved debates in photography (and its relationship with writing of various kinds).
And the film clip:
2 Comments
In my experience, too, the photo world is divided in two camps – in those who want photography to remain undefiled by words and concepts and those who indeed take a strong interest in words (literature and theory). The first camp appears to be larger and more vocal, yet it comprises a considerably lesser number of interesting photographers than the second camp.
The first camp subscribes to a cult of the immediacy of the photographic act, which to them is an almost religious, instantaneously occurring epiphany. As you quite rightly pointed out, this cult of immediacy is often rather paradoxically wed to an almost anal interest in the technical processes and parameters of photography, which are far removed from any kind of immediacy. An artificially upheld naiveté regarding the actual taking of pictures is coupled with a mindless delight in technology for its own sake. They hate words because they would disturb this quaint attitude and would complicate the process. However, in my experience, these photographers often experience great difficulties when they have to edit their pictures and to create actual works – portfolios, series, exhibitions, books etc.. They remain tied to the single image (epiphany x technical labor) and fail when confronted with the entirety of their output. The whole process that comes after shooting and printing remains extraneous to their definition of photographic work. I guess the reason they were attracted to photography in the first place was “It’s easy, it’s so easy,” and they want it to remain that way and stick to their teenage-boy experience of photography. I am afraid to say that in my experience the wordless, apparent ease of photography seems to hold an undeniable attraction for stupid people with simple aesthetic visions.
The second camp that takes an interest in words is more likely to consider the process that comes after shooting and printing an integral part of their work, often even the most important one. By extension, of course, if the process after the actual image production becomes more important, the reflections preceding the taking of the image also become more intricate and extensive. The actual production of the image is a mere fraction in this approach to photography. If a photographer dwells the question what to do with his photographs, how to present, combine, structure, and arrange them, they become a bit like words that you can use to create sentences. The photographic process suddenly becomes extensive and denser, poses new challenges and offers new opportunities. It’s suddenly not so easy anymore – quite in fact the indecisive moments multiply –, but more rewarding. Photography really becomes close to writing if you approach it this way. Hence, photographers who work in this manner, in my experience, almost always have a natural affinity for literature and / or theory.
It seems to me that the relation of photographers to words is very intimately tied to their definition of the photographic process and what it comprises.
Many thanks Aveek and Martin
Speaking for myself I don’t think I would be interested in making photographs or writing about them if I thought there was an easy or even worthwhile separation to be made between intellect and spontaneity, between thought and instinct, between language and image (both language and image are representations, substitutes). Photography appeals, humbles and engages me because it makes a mockery of all that.
I see a tension between the moment of shooting, which is usually the moment on which all the chips of ‘spontaneity’ tend to be stacked, and Aveek’s aversion to the single image in preference for the edited assembly. It is in the editing process that we are faced with the fruits and failures of our spontaneity (this is something that also came up in Bernd Steigler’s blog). It’s pretty much impossible to get an image from a negative, transaprency or digital file into the world without considering it in one way or another, without being confronted after the fact with what that spontaneity was and what merit it might have. While Aveek cites John Donne, we might also invoke the LAPD: shoot first, ask questions later. Either the photographer does this themself, or an editor or the image languishes. Similarly it’s almost impossible to have a long career as even a ‘spontaneous’ photographer without reflecting on it at some point. Denial and disavowal can’t go on forever.
I agree that many photographers have an aversion to thinking about what they do, to writing about it, or even reading about it. But I do notice, and here I agree with Martin, that the better the photographer, actually the more they’ve thought about it and the better they are with words (some many not choose to express themselves that way too often, but that’s not the same thing). In twenty years’ experience of teaching I have noticed that the resistance to language tends to be the curse of the semi-talented and untalented, who will erect any barrier to protect their spontaneity or intuition, under the illusion that it somehow ‘must be good’. We must accept that a ‘spontaneous’ person may also be a very reactionary, unimaginative and thoughtless person . We don’t like it when people stand on the street barking aloud their deepest prejudices but somehow if they do it with a camera that’s deemed OK. Let’s not kid ourselves: the crimes – aesthetic, artistic, social – comitted and repeated in the name of intuition far outnumber its great gifts. That’s the price we pat for having an unconscious.
That said, I’m inclined to agree with Aveek that photographers might well benefit more from taking a tangential approach to ‘theory’ than a direct one. That’s probably true for any of the arts. When filmmakers engage with and read only about film it shows in their work (the so called film-brat generation: too often insular, self-referential, socially inept, historically ignorant and politically complacent). I do see equivalents in photography. Many young art photographers seem to look at and read only about art photography. And certainly too many young peole working in street photography, the genre that has put the most emphasis on instinct and spontaneity, look at and read only about street photography. As a result the promiscuous openness of the medium to other areas of life and culture is foreclosed and made quite hermetic (the opposite of what made street photography so extraordinary in the first place). I sense this is a phase photography has had to go through, the result of a generation of narrowly institutionlised photo-theory, photo museums, and photography education. But you can’t unring a bell. There’s no naive state to which to return. It’s something photography will have to negotiate.
Looking forward I can foresee perfectly well forms of photography education (including self-education) that bypass ‘photography-theory’ altogether in favour of what used to be called a ‘liberal arts’ education which might focus itself much more on those fields and discourses onto which photography opens and in which it plays an important part: history, anthropology, art, literature, poetry, architecture, design, politics, nature, urbanism, commerce, fashion, family life, psychoanalysis, sociology, philosophy, economics and so on.
But I’d like to ask Aveek something. You enjoy writing about/with/around photography. What is it that photography offers you as a writer?
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