In Defense of Leaving the Single Image Behind

Wow.  Let me just start somewhere, eh?  In defense of what’s above, but also in defense of letting oneself embrace the rambling mind.  Tangential threads – welcome!  I don’t know if it’s the nature of secluded time during an artist’s residency (certainly in part) or if it’s more to do with this newfound freedom I’ve embraced, of yes, leaving the single image, for one.

Now, this is not a new thought for me.  I’ve known for some time that I was no longer interested in the photographic “moment” per se.  And that gets back to my fixation on the instant, or instance (is instance plural of instant? – an instance, as encompassing a duration, but yet an instant occupies a duration as well, but do we think of it as inherently being more brief, I wonder – and then what about “moment” – for whatever reason that conjures within me a more lingering, poetic passage of time, one “brief moment” could seem to endure for a painfully long time, whereas we think of things being “over in an instant”).  At any rate, you can see where the (my) problem lies.

So I choose to work with multiple frames – generally those that were captured (in time and in space) very close together.  I’m certain this also has to do with a general shift in subject matter over the years and also a different set of preoccupations.  I work fast/slow – both methodically and stupidly.  It’s always in response to the world, but either that which has been sitting there for quite a while, with minimal transformation other than seasonal/environmental (landscape type spaces) or that which is in my immediate surround, also mainly sitting there pretty quietly, aside from my random interventions – but mainly it’s just me looking at a space, a corner, a slice, responding to something that was prompted simply by virtue of perception. (I rambled off the next paragraph and in the midst had to take a break to photograph the bedspread in the sunlight, because I noticed something when I walked back to the desk from fixing my tea – how many bedspreads in sunlight can I photograph?  Apparently, quite a few.  They’re all different, of course – maybe a separate post on that later). 

Right so, back to the single image chit-chat.  I realize this is not a new notion – photographers have certainly worked with multiples of similarity before and there are many examples out there (Meatyard comes to mind quickly, with some of his repetitive landscape abstractions), and there are even more examples with contemporary work (yes, Uta Barth, I know – but many others as well) and I suspect that more and more of this will become common.  We are now very accustomed to a photographic type or way of seeing, and many of us realize this does not necessarily attach itself solely to one view of a subject from a fixed vantage point for a predetermined fraction (or sometimes longer) of a second.  

What we get from that type of representation (which can certainly be remarkable) is a stable relic of sorts – or maybe even a suggestion that eternity has been fixed in an instant (to paraphrase Cartier-Bresson).  But what has been fixed, really?  (And this is sort of hard to get at in relation to a Cartier-Bresson quote, because I can understand his perspective as a street photographer, thinking about the flux of humanity, rapidly passing in front of his lens and indeed, isolating a solitary fragment from the flow – fixing, perhaps, a bit of the optical unconscious.)  But how then could we attach this idea to images of landscape, or those that sit still – even a formal portrait, perhaps?  When time presents itself as its own entity (part of the subject matter, or even as subject itself) the single photograph confounds our expectations, operating differently in response to subject matter that does not move than to that which can (possibly) be captured or halted.  The descriptive qualities of the photographic image are mesmerizing, to be sure, and to be able to fix our gaze for “an eternity” is one thing – but to suggest that somehow an instant has been captured is problematic.  There is duration.  And there is no saying where that duration starts, or where it ends.  Hence, the filmic representation can only do so much as well – always decontextualizing the world, that’s all any re-presentation can do.  

So there’s no solution to this through use of the multiple either (thankfully).  It’s simply another way of drawing out this kind of photographic seeing in relation to, I suppose, metaphysical questions of being and knowing.  I choose to emphasize the fragmentary nature of photographic depiction by replicating and reiterating, thereby emphasizing the gaps within perception in general.  I’m still in love with the notion of the transcendental photographer as suggested by Laruelle (in an earlier post) and also with Hollis Frampton’s notion of an “infinite cinema” – the camera always having been running and will continue to run forever, we plunk out little bits at a time – and also with Crary’s emphasis upon the inability to represent the temporal experience within the camera obscura – all of this is jumbled around with my thinking about the multiple, but more specifically about what we expect from or desire from the camera, and the camera image.

To See What the World Looks Like (Photographed)

Quoting each other – that’s certainly what we do.  Especially when using a camera, or referring to/thinking of oneself as a photographer, an artist, a poet, a whatthehellever.  So, today’s ramble is going to be (a bit) less about my own work specifically, and more about some things I’ve been thinking about lately in relation to the enormous realm of the photographic (and I think of this space as pretty damn all-encompassing – I mean, is there a visual we have in our minds that we don’t also know in photographic form?).

Alright, so the post title – a recognizable portion of the Garry Winogrand quote “I photograph to see what the world looks like photographed.”  And yeah, why not?  And I believe him – eminent street photographer that he was.  He knew that his experience of that world as he made his way through it was markedly distinct from how it would later appear in its photographic re-presentation.  Now, his process was part and parcel of his work – the way he roamed the streets with camera at the ready, spontaneously pressed to eye instinctively, intuitively (I’m imagining, at any rate).  To be in the world while simultaneously recording it – playing it back later to see how it differed, which bits of the optical unconscious were revealed. 

But does this thinking only apply to the street, or to the rapidly unfolding world – order out of chaos type of thing?  I mean, we could apply it to huge swaths of landscape photographs as well – giant ass mountains that just sit there under puffed up clouds (that seem to be) frozen in space, or just the ground with no horizon and nothing to tell the viewer that this image is also a moment.  But, these images too are markedly different from the scene as it existed to the camera and the photographer that once or twice (or more) stood in its proximity.  As photographs, they are nothing more than, “a piece of time and space well described,” as Winogrand would say of his own work.

Having never worked in the street photography mode, I find it interesting how impactful that Winogrand interview with Bill Moyers was on me as a younger student.  Looking back it seems even my earliest “serious” photographs, though in a decidedly more traditional documentary style than my current work, were still concerned with those primary questions that encountering a photograph prompts – what am I seeing, how am I seeing it, why am I seeing it, why am I seeing what I know so differently than how I think I know it?

Dawn Roe:  Zoe with Cigarette (2000)

And this is where a problem comes in – and it’s a problem with a lot of what constitutes good photography (as designated by the current tastemakers – of which there are of course many, and whose opinions are of course varied).  But, there’s a lot of stuff out there that’s not questioning things anymore to the extent perhaps it should.  To depict and express what we “know” in photographic form to simply illustrate what it looks like is fundamentally distinct from asking us to think about what it “looks like photographed.”  Now, that might seem ridiculous, but I believe this.  And I believe this because it has to do with an investment in the question(s).  To look through the viewfinder and click the shutter (or role the tape) because you noticed something (or arranged something) that looked interesting (or cool, or artistic) is not enough.  What could that possibly tell us, or prompt us to question, rather than its relation to other images we know (which admittedly, at times can be an interesting territory of pursuit, but not if that’s not the intention).

So this is where I find this nice link between Winogrand’s sentiments and those of Uta Barth.  Which brings me back around to my earlier point about these notions not solely being the territory of the street photograph.  Barth’s work is decidedly quiet and contemplative, and has the quality of being simultaneously quickly happened upon and painstakingly constructed – not entirely dissimilar from Winogrands perfected compositions (it’s not incidental that my current students consistently read his work as having been staged).   But here again is this implicit concern with how these perceptual experiences are transcribed in photographic form.  These are not paintings (although they may share more aesthetic reference points with the painted canvas than the printed photograph), they are photographs – straight photographs.  Purposefully so.

Now I’m thinking about all of this because as I mentioned above, we quote each other.  And yes, most certainly, my own work is made in full awareness of the work of Uta Barth (and Luisa Lambri and Elisa Sighicelli and Andres Tarkovsky and countless others who’ve influenced me).  But, if someone says “that’s too much like Uta Barth, or too much like X,Y,Z” that doesn’t mean I stop.  It means I extend the question.  So I guess that’s my point today – I want to see more extension (oh, and you better believe that relates directly back to Bergson’s notion of duration, and to endure).

What the heck kinda fun am I going to have next week?!