Washing the dishes

“While washing the dishes, you might be thinking about the tea afterwards, and so try to get them out of the way as quickly as possible in order to sit and drink tea. But that means you are incapable of living during the time you are washing the dishes. When you are washing the dishes, washing the dishes must be the most important thing in your life. Just as when you’re drinking tea, drinking tea must be the most important thing in your life.”

— Thich Nhat Hanh

And so I tell my students, in the spirit of Thich Nhat Hanh and his mindfulness teachings, ‘when you are developing film, developing film must be the most important thing in your life.’

The myth of the moment

It’s a central, time-honoured concept that the act of photographic creation happens in a brief moment of time. The idea pervades artistic statements, critical essays, the very language we use to describe our activity as photographers. ‘The moment it clicks’, we say.

A closer look at this idea of the moment raises some interesting questions. Do we perceive this ‘moment’, do we dwell in it in any substantial sense? If my exposure is for one second (not uncommon in my large format practice), I think so. What of 1/10 of a second? Scientists say I am able to, in part because of the speed at which the human perceptual system works. What of 1/60, or 1/125? Now I am not so sure …. 

Somebody might object that it depends on what we mean by dwelling in or being conscious of a certain moment, as against the brute act of perceiving at a subconscious level. Nevertheless, when we speak of intention, we speak of knowing. To question the extent to which we dwell in the moment we press the shutter severs the link between intention and execution. In a curious sense we cannot claim to intend a photograph - at least not wholly - if we cannot claim to be aware of the moment in time of its creation.

For me a photograph is both what a photographer intends and more than that. There is in every act of photographic creation an excess of recording, of visual detail and meaning, that exceeds what the photographer ‘sees’. I find this an enticing more than a damaging prospect; a reason for, rather than against, further inquiry. If the ‘moment’ of the shutter press turns out to be a myth, then it is another way into this interface, this play between intention and meaning that is the photograph.

The photographer as collector (or, my camera collection is safe ... for now)

What are photographers if not collectors? I’m not entirely sure what it is that they collect: memories, maybe, visual imprints from the world, the action of light on objects, the list goes on.

I read an editorial this week promoting the virtues of reducing one’s worldly possessions. It’s a familiar refrain of today: throw out the things you’ve not used in a year and you will be lighter physically and emotionally. Continue to live life with this philosophy and you will be happier.

Please take this blog entry with a piece of salt, for I am an inveterate hoarder. I do wonder, however, whether there isn’t something very deep-rooted in our desire to keep stuff. Objects help to build our identities and foster memories. They offer a sense of touch, sight and smell that can trigger Proustian moments. Many we associate with particular times in our lives, and some we are compelled to keep through the social contract of the gift.

I wonder if this compulsion doesn’t connect to a much bigger cultural endeavour: the attempt to vanquish our mortality. It is often said that our museums and galleries are simply repositories of efforts to produce something that will out-live - and therefore mark the existence of - their makers. Statues are clearly commemorative and self-aggrandising, but what if a whole gamut of cultural objects weren’t essentially doing the same thing? Does not what we do on a small level in our homes echo this social compulsion to leave a mark? To postpone the inevitable?

It is true that, like many photographers, I have an somewhat unwieldy collection of cameras. I might not exactly be looking for a grand justification to keep them, but, perhaps with the above in mind, I might postpone any drastic cull for a little longer.

Photographing without a camera

The couple sit in silence. Both sit upright, almost uncomfortably so. They look not at each other but straight ahead. Into the cafe, perhaps, or out of the windows beyond. Or into that space of daydream focus: neither near nor far. No words are exchanged between them. Their silence is that of a couple who know each other so intimately as to need no words. Their understanding and togetherness is a priori.

I imagine framing them. I think about the 35mm frame, with a crop to suggest a near panoramic view. I imagine them both looking into the distance, to the viewer and beyond. I really like the idea of accentuating the space between them: I want to emphasise the distance in their togetherness. It would be my job to ensure that no uninvited objects creep into the frame. The view should be clean and clinical, the background plain, continuous. Their postures should dominate. If I am lucky I might catch a moment when they both simultaneously raise a coffee cup. Together in silence, mirroring one another, yet somewhere else.

This is a photograph I have seen and not made. It is an exercise in visualisation, a fine image that I didn’t make. Sometimes I enjoy making pictures as much without a camera as with.

Photography and ritual

Turn. Turn. Turn. Turn. Put down with a little jolt. Wait. 

My hands leave the developing tank and my mind is wandering. I have the time in focus, no question, but I’m starting to think about what I’m doing. I’m starting to see a parallel between developing a film and something else.

Place the record down. Start the platter. Gently run the carbon fibre brush over the record. Lean it forward, lean it back, draw it outwards. Set the needle down. Adjust the volume. Adjust headphones. Adjust the volume again.

Listening to a vinyl record is undoubtedly an act full of ritual. As the old joke goes, vinyl is desirable both for its high cost and inconvenience. That ‘inconvenience’ brings a set of actions that become inseparable from the listening experience. The ritual is inseparable from the listening experience.

I wonder if film is similarly ‘inconvenient’. In the sense that, it demands a series of preparatory actions (in my example, development) that become an integral part of how we experience it. It is frequently said that film photographs feel ‘made’ (and I haven’t mentioned darkroom yet). Preparatory actions become ritualistic. Little rituals we enact that prolong and intensify our experience of a medium. Little rituals we do with our own little touches and personal ways.

Does digital photography involve rituals? Probably, and to some extent. Yet I notice the rituals of my use of film much more readily. Is it an accident that in my parallel vinyl is an analogue medium? It’s hard to see the same pertaining to playing an MP3. 

Do analogue lovers have an affinity for ritual? My guess is they do.
 

In praise of amateurs

For many of us who engage seriously with photography, we are unavoidably amateurs. We practice photography in our spare time and fund it through our main mode of employment. Without earning a living from photography, we lay no claim to professional status, although we may have ‘professional’ aspirations, and may even make a modest dividend from selling prints or similar.

For some, the term ‘amateur’ will have negative connotations. In this little post I want to argue that it is something we should embrace, a title that conveys significant dignity and, in some senses, status.

The latin root of the word points towards ‘lover’, and so we may think of an amateur as a lover of the medium. An amateur is someone who is able to pursue his or her interests unfettered by the needs of a client, or the conventions of an organised group. Indeed, many amateurs gain considerable expertise in niche areas of photography, simply because of the freedom to pursue exactly what they desire, and to direct their resources to such an end.

There is a tendency for a great many amateurs to look longingly towards professional status. Quality photographic equipment is marketed on the back of these desires. Ironically, much gear that bears the ‘pro’ label is in fact sold to an advanced amateur market. Professionals don’t have it easy. They are shackled by the demands of work and the necessity to marshal resources to make the bottom line pay. They cannot indulge in frivolous purchases, nor can they alter a work schedule to follow an experimental whim. In many ways, they are a lot worse off than those who would aspire to be them.

There is another, more subtle, reason why one might not actually want to aspire to professional status. To be a professional means to speak a very particular aesthetic language. We teach ‘professional’ methods and outcomes to our photography students, but what this really means is ‘make images like this’. Professional images look like, well, other professional images. This is a problem that is well recognised in the visual arts, a problem for which the term ‘academicism’ was coined. We can trace very precisely how the language of fine art developed from the French 18th century academies through to contemporary art today. For the painter in the first academies, to be an academician meant precisely to follow a set pattern of working that very much determined how the painting would turn out. This isn’t to say that there wasn’t any innovation, but the parameters in which you could work were highly codified.

So, for me as a practitioner, the label amateur has a number of attractions. It reminds me of the considerable freedoms I enjoy, both in what I do with photography and how I do it. The medium itself has a special place in my philosophy of photography, and so I find the idea of a lover of the medium to be a description of great dignity. As an amateur, I am free to be as idiosyncratic as I like, an idiosyncrasy that has the potential to lead to aesthetic innovation.

The recent rise in the popularity of analogue photographic media may well be a case in point. I can’t help but wonder whether a key attraction of film is precisely that it frees the photographer from so many of today’s picture making strictures and technical processes. This isn’t to say that film is somehow ‘not technical’ (it is, of course), but there is a directness and rawness that comes from an engagement with film that gives the user a sense of oneness with the medium. Additionally, film demands a commitment in time and inconvenience that a large majority of photography professionals have long turned their backs on in the name of working expedient. I don’t think it’s far fetched to say there is a relationship between the analogue resurgence and amateurism in my qualified sense.

Today, I am indeed happy to be an amateur.

Where is the work?

Is it on screen? On social media? In the print? In the print you made, or that someone else made for you?

Is it ‘the image’, or maybe, ‘image idea’: an abstraction that exists apart from all the physical versions? Or does the work have to be a ‘thing’ for you? A physical thing like a print that you can touch or hold?

For the former we might think negative or RAW file. We might not be too worried about where or how the different versions appear, because we are thinking of ourselves as ‘image makers’. The latter, however, leads to more traditional connotations of control and visualisation. Dare I even write ‘photography’, traditionally conceived.

Ansel Adams had an insightful way of seeing the problem. He famously called the negative the ‘score’ and the print the ‘performance’. This analogy with music is useful because it recognises the gap between image idea and realised, physical photograph. Insightful though it is, it doesn’t quite resolve the issues. Which is the definitive Moonrise, Hernandez by Adams? The early print, near to the time of exposure, or the later, darker versions with more contrast? 

Adams didn’t have to contend with social media either. What happens if you share a scan of your negative online, and then go on to make a darkroom print later? Where is the work in this case? The latter will subtly different; although potentially not so different that the ‘image idea’ is contradicted.

Must your work exist for a given period of time? This is written into traditional practice. One of the reasons for the high values for Adams’ prints is not only their highly individualised craft status, but their longevity, thanks to the silver gelatin medium and craftsman-like, archival processing. An iPhone or equivalent image is an obvious candidate for temporary status - made, maybe shared, enjoyed, laughed at … and then gone - but there are issues with images and files we might assume to be more permanent. Many photographers who made early migrations to digital have file storage and retrieval headaches. Discs become unreadable, software is not longer supported, old machines fail. Negatives made many decades earlier are still perfectly good today for scanning or darkroom printing.

For us as photography practitioners, these fascinating, near philosophical questions, resolve into practical ones. We face a series of choices about the work we want to make and where we personally stand on the issues. We can be an image maker or traditional photographer. It’s up to us to draw the necessary lines of engagement, to police definitive, perhaps physical versions if appropriate, or to concentrate our energies on other kinds of image construction and dissemination.

Like it or not, you do have to wonder where the work is.

The art historian under the dark cloth

The other day I came across my copy of T.J. Clark’s book Farewell to An Idea. It is a splendid work of art history, one that positively crackles with the most detailed and painstaking descriptions of Modernist artworks. As I flipped through the book, I remembered in particular the passages on Jackson Pollock’s paintings. Looking back, I had read and re-read these passages, almost as one might enjoy a novel.

Clark is an intellectual heavyweight in the old manner. He set up a masters degree in the 1970s called the Social History of Art, dedicated to a Marxist approach to art history. I studied on that programme in the late 1990s, under the tuition of Jasper Johns expert Fred Orton, amongst others. While Clark’s book is hardly light reading, it does repay the hard work it demands of the reader.

Now, I write that Clark’s descriptions stand out, but it isn’t just that these are careful and rigorous, which they are. There’s something more. They are object lessons in how to read a work of art. Clark makes every effort to convey the richness of the works he grapples with; it becomes a time consuming process of looking and looking again, a process that demands equal care with writing. The writing is not an afterthought, a means to an end in the descriptive enterprise, but a poetical analogue of the condition of paying close attention. This is perfectly in line with Clark and his ilk, who believe that canonical works of art repay that kind of close treatment. Unlike so many art historians though, Clark has learnt the figurative and rhetorical potential of his prose, and I can’t help feeling that his search for the ‘right’ phrase (a mirage of course) is a figure for our search for meaning in the painted and other material forms.

As is the tradition in so many of these blog posts, I make a recommendation to the photographer. Spend some time with Clark (or a Clark equivalent) and see how he describes the artwork. Think about how such a careful approach might be applied to a photograph - a canonical one, of course, but perhaps yours or a friends, too. Photography is so often a descriptive business. I’ve written on these pages before that there is much to learn from carefully looking at the work of others, and an analysis of composition, tone, mood, and so forth is the nuts and bolts work to be done.

This not only helps us to appreciate the finished image, but sharpens our skills of looking and in turn informs our visualisation. Indeed, as I continue to grapple with learning large format photography, I’m struck by how that format offers up a picture to be read right at the start. Under the dark cloth one has time to survey the flickering camera obscura image as if it were the final print. The Clark pacing to and fro in front of Pollock’s paintings in MOMA would be a wonderful mental guide to critical and rigorous decision making at the time of exposure. I can envisage him asking us to trace a line here, shift a little there, re-think depth of field, interpret a tonal shift. You would be right in thinking that this is not unlike the procedures recommended to us by experts like Ansel Adams, but the point here is that our resources stretch much further than the discipline of photography alone. And there are riches out there indeed.