Speed of Photography: Stay Absolutely Still
Stop what you’re doing. Well, finish this paragraph and then stop what you’re doing. Look all around you. Look straight up, straight down. Turn 90° to your right, then again, and again, until you’ve come back around to where you started. Look around at everything closest to you until you can’t bear to keep looking, then come back to this blog post.
John Cage, the modernist classical composer, once spoke of the profound effect of entering a soundproof anechoic chamber- a room totally insulated from outside sound and structured on the inside to absorb all sound and reflect nothing back. Expecting to hear perfect silence, he instead reported to the technician outside the room that he heard a high tone and a low tone. It was reported that this was, respectively, the sound of his own nervous system, and the sound of his own circulatory system.
The best analogous experience to light I’ve had is being deep underground in a cave and experiencing “cave darkness”- the perfect absence of light, with no glints or glimmers of light. With your hand pressed right up against your face, waving back and forth, you experience no visual differentiation. It is truly dark- darker than the inky night with your eyes closed and face down.
Let’s compare these two experiences of contrived lack to things toward the other end of the experiential spectrum.
The experience of being unable to “escape” sound, that there is always a sound of existence drove Cage to compose 4’33”; a work for piano where the performer walks out on stage and performs a piece in three movements (delineated by an opening and closing piano cover) amount to four minutes and 33 seconds of no notes being struck on the piano. It was a piece that was received as a snub and affront to the concert-going audience that was expecting to hear music. Cage’s point was not a joke or a ruse, it was that the world is so richly full of sound that to be aware of this, intentionally, is as good as music. The A/C, shuffling, coughing, the humming of electricity, the clicks and groans of a building, everything the audience heard during that first performance was surely a cacophony when compared to a perfectly insulated and sound-absorbing room!
Likewise, consider everything you can see right now in contrast to the experience of perfect blackness. Look at the brightest thing in your vision (except, please don’t look directly at the sun) then look at the darkest region nearby you. Look at the softest thing. Look at the wettest thing. Find the saddest thing nearby you. Find the most acute angle. Find something that’s moving, even if it’s quite slowly- perhaps it’s the moon arcing through the night sky. If you’re at home, I’m sure you can find something that needs some cleaning. Find the thing that hasn’t been moved for the longest, then find the thing that you last moved. Count the number of objects you can see.
If we were treating this as a writing exercise, I doubt if you could adequately describe every aspect of what’s around you given an entire afternoon to sit where you are and write. Sure, you can give the basic outline of the room— I’m sure wherever you’re sitting is not too uncommon to be able to quickly describe. “I’m in my living room. It’s got a couch, a bookshelf, a portal to the hall, a portal to the kitchen, a door from the front yard, a staircase, a door to the side porch.” What color is the couch? How many cushions? What is the quality of the fabric? Are there any stains? Etc. and etc., ad nausea. You will never exhaust with your words the visual richness (visual richness alone! You have not told me anything about how you got that couch in your house!) of even the most simple room. Compared to a pitch black cave, wherever you’re sitting and reading this probably has enough visual richness to make one vomit if our brains weren’t so good at keeping us sane and focused on important details, filtering out the cacophony of sensory input long enough for us to get stuff done.
I’ll just take a picture
What has this got to do at all with photography?
You will recall that this series began with the charter of laying out a practical accounting for the effects that movement has on photography. How do we see what we see? How do we get there? What does getting there mean for the picture you are trying to take? Let’s begin instead with the question of not moving at all. If you were forced to sit where you are right now for the rest of your life, or even the rest of this week, what kind of photographs would make? Would you even want to photograph?
Photography is too big to ever account for in one sentence of pithy insight, but one thing that photographs seem to do is commodify the experience and desires associated with looking. I don’t believe that photography as a technology had (or has) any ability to fundamentally change who we are, yet any technology, in its capacity to amplify or extend our human faculties, may necessarily channel and steer desires in certain ways. To reach for the commonly used historical example, a book copied by hand is valuable- few people bother to learn to read because expensive books are rare, and there is farming to do. A book made by a machine that can make 1,000 identical books is cheap. Maybe I’ll find out what all this fuss about “literacy” is.
Then a few centuries later you get blogs about photography.
The closest antecedent to photography is painting. To paint a picture of nature, to spend time considering the impression that nature makes on one’s eyes, one’s mind, and one’s heart and to translate that into a striking image takes time and skill. The painter will furthermore be concerned about the verisimilitude between the scene and his image. There are many interesting academic discussions to have about how close one desires to make something look relative to the scene.
Enter the photographer, with his “vision machine”- in a few seconds or less a perfect image is made. Very well- can you make more? And, perhaps after a few hundred million images have been made, now that picture of Water Lillies doesn’t seem quite so interesting any more. Perhaps you could find an amazing valley in the American West, this new frontier we have never explored with machines? After a hundred or more years of photographs in Yosemite, you may have taken a vacation there and gotten some nice photos, but did you go when the sunset perfectly illuminates a sliver of cliff as if there was fire falling from the cliff face? No? Oh, man, I saw this amazing photo once…
Becoming aware of this richness all around us, we think that perhaps we can just grab a slice of it with a camera, and maybe get 90% of the way there (give or take 10%) to fully representing that moment. This is impossible.
Photography starts at a disadvantage because we prize vision as the one sense to rule them all- it is closely tied to beauty as an overriding objective for representation. To see is to see proof, to believe, to comprehend, and so on. There is moral and intellectual freight carried by "seeing" as an activity distinct from, yet closely bound with, vision. So, when using that "vision machine" we suddenly treat photography as this strange machine for showing desirous things, showing "beauty" as we understand beauty- something that we must possess or at least understand. We can get mad at photography when it doesn't re-animate that supposedly "frozen moment." It may give us a sharp pang of nostalgia, but photography fails to remove the past from amber for two simple reasons:
Experience is a rich, rich, rich composite of your five (only five? No!) senses in harmony above the bassline of your personality and memory- every individual sliver-moment of your life is a rich experiential buffet for you to consider
This experiential buffet is only open for "the present." To attempt to turn back the clock to that moment you have attempted to freeze is actually to wish that our memories would move in reverse, the smells would come back, the temperature of the air, the social dynamics, our aches and pains and our physical sensations would all revert back to when that photo was taken. It is impossible. The train only moves in one direction, but there's a lot to see as it moves.
Insofar as we think that photography can transport us back in time, or even insofar as we believe that photography can meaningfully show us "a moment" rather than a very accurate image of something, we will always be looking for it to do something more and better because we think we have failed. We think that to go farther and to see something more interesting, to have an experience more profound will suddenly allow us to make a photo which fill finally satisfy.
I should know, I’ve done it practically my whole life.
I have frequently thought that the key to getting better pictures was to get farther away, whatever that meant. Farther from my comfort zone, farther away from people, farther from any sort of intrusion of man onto the landscape and into the more pristine, remote, “Sacred” (with no particular attachment to what Sacred means here… I just believed there was more of it the farther away I went). Only, I was never content to just witness it, I had to capture it for myself and for the “benefit” of others with my vision machine, yet, if it was doing anything it was at least commodifying and mechanizing my expectations of looking. Of course I had to find something grander and more remote- I had a lot of other images to compete against. I had to make mine really interesting in some way, whether by what they were or what I said about what they were.
How could you possibly make a good story about a picture that wasn’t from anywhere but what’s around you all the time?
Photography presses on your vision, your very perception. Perception here is the combination of the sensory input that light makes on your brain via your eyes along with the vast interconnected web of thoughts, biases, expectations, fears, longings, loves, prejudices, memories, delusions, anxieties, humor, and whatever other unknowable factors finally and fully make up your you-ness. In a crass example, perhaps, the painter may see a beautiful field of grass and the “fat-cat capitalist” may see a plot of land for development. Both are receiving the same light, but the psycho-socio-harmonization by the two individual souls is vastly different.
When you are photographing, you're perceiving from the intersection between the brain you possess, and the anticipation of everything that photography may do once it's been made. For, to have frozen a moment in time (though I think this is faulty impulse with which to make photos), you now have a new bit of reality to ponder later on; it's now separated from the reality you just saw with your two eyes. Photography may not do everything we want it to, but it does a lot of things. It is part of reality, after all.
What are these insane photos I'm seeing
The insane photos you're seeing are from a series I made several years ago called "Boy House". You can read more about it on my old blog here, but the basic motivating factor of the series was to create photographs in the peculiar little house I found myself in at a particular point in time. The time was between college and getting married, and I realized the house (a large house, formerly a family dwelling, now with five bachelors living there) was unique in itself, and also a place the likes of which I would live again. Having just finished my undergrad, I was also feeling a bit burn out of going "out there" to make photos. I decided that the spacious house I was in was enough to make photos in, and I was right.
For months, I poked around the house with the same equipment every time- a 100mm macro lens and an on-camera flash. The space in the house allowed a 100mm lens to not feel too restrictive, and the flash opened up possibilities for making the dirty, dusty services come alive with a peculiar sort of feeling.
Yet, "peculiar feeling" was not the only thing I was reaching for. What could be the point of such a series? The photos, I think, are rather unsettling. They sit somewhere between that feeling of invading on someone's private space, yet also having someone's private space invading on you- when you happen to find yourself in a house that is below your standards and expectations for the cleanliness of a domicile. I think eliciting that effect may have been "enough", yet I started the series with a more proximate concern in mind- I wanted to understand my space through my lens and through the light from my camera. And, beyond that, I wanted to know what it meant to take a picture without feeling like I had to go somewhere else to do it. Bluntly, that's most of what I was trying to accomplish.
Photographs that are visibly set in one's home or apartment got a bad rep in college. When we saw a dorm room or a late-teens-early-20s apartment, even though we were mostly in the same stage of life, it just felt amateurish immediately. It felt like the photographer didn't go through the work of either going somewhere else or erasing the setting from the context of the photo completely. Letting a photo just be "in your house" feels lazy, commonplace. Again, this is the bias that a photo must be "out there" in order to be "good". It comes back to that idea of the commodification of experience- someone must show me something new, exciting, uncanny- a college apartment is not that.
Yet, I also want to contrast that to a strange sensation I have sometimes felt when looking at old photos of junk. Sometimes I feel quite thankful for them. I won't show you any photos of my current messy house, yet sometimes there's a pleasant, nostalgic feeling of seeing how the junk used to be arranged "just so". Even the rubbish and clutter, once it's gone or has changed remarkably, can spark feelings of nostalgia for the viewer (when the viewer was also the maker).
I wouldn't ask the same of a different viewer. There is something like an unstated contract between a viewer and a maker when one calls a thing "art." It is almost like the artist is asking a suspense of disbelief, or even an active belief on then part of the viewer in order to enter into the experience of a piece. To be asked to enter (with faith or expectation) something commonplace, pedestrian, even "profane" (as in the opposite of "holy") is at "best" a mean joke and at worse cruel or evil. I will never ask someone to think of the photos I have taken of clutter in my house as art.
While some saw Cage's 4'33" we discussed earlier as an evil ruse, thumbing his nose at the reality of beautiful music, I think Cage's composition is just working towards these ends of considering the actual richness of the world as you can experience it at any given moment. There really is a lot there.
That doesn't mean though that photos in a house can never be art. What I am trying to say is that in the experience of sitting exactly where you are and considering the world in front of you, there is inevitably a richness of experience and observation available to you. The stream of consciousness of life is arrestingly beautiful- the bounty of sensory experiences both individually and in composite is amazing. Whatever medium one chooses to make art in, they are arranging within and for that reality that speaks and contains a great bounteous wealth of experience and beauty. I can take a nice photograph of a beautiful view, and the view remains beautiful, the photograph itself may be beautiful (differently), and to see it (whether on a computer screen or in a gallery) is beautiful (differently as well).
Whether beauty is the instrumental portion of art (or the imperative experience of life) or even what beauty are is a discussion for another day. We may just a easily speak of what you are seeing in front of you as "interesting", or "full of things to know" or "worth considering" or anything else. Reality speaks, and whether we are about to take a photograph, take a shower, take a nap, or have dinner with a friend, there is a great chorus of information and sensory experience in front of us to consider at every single moment.
So, these photos may be beautiful in one way, and some are quite repulsive in others. Yet they are one project where I specifically remember trying to comes to terms with the "is-ness" of the world all around me. I am willing to call these art only in the sense that I believe these photos are capable of alluding to that "is-ness" and transcend a mere nostalgia and memory of my time at that odd house.
Right Before you Take a Picture
I will make the claim later that walking is the last thing you do before you make a photo, regardless of whatever manner of motion you have chosen to convey yourself somewhere to take a photo. This is not precisely true, but I think it's mostly true. What's actually totally true, though, is that you will always be exactly where you are right before you take a photo. No matter how finely and discretely you want to try to locate "the past" in the time behind you (surely it is an hour ago, but what about a minute ago? Or a half a second ago? Or the start of this very letter ago?) or how closely you want to consider "the future" in front of you (Think of an alarm going off, or getting a phone call… how experientially close can you get to that before you are in the moment when something abrupt happens?) you will always be in the present when you make a photograph. There is a world in front of your eyes. Reality and the present, space and time- you are at a very small junction of the two as an embodied person considering the world.
This is not mysticism, this is the realest thing there is- reality. When you take a picture you are dealing with reality, you are forming more material into a representation with strong verisimilitude, but it is merely and wonderfully reality. You are not creating, you are not imagining out of nothing, you are forming. It happens wherever you are however conscious you are of it. You are a body situated in space and you must contend with that every time you take a photo. The goal is not to try to disappear into that sensation or to acquiesce to a sort of disembodied state, but to remember that you are a person and your history, your beliefs, your desires, all of that is with you when you make art. All of your "you-ness" is bearing upon the "is-ness" of the world, subject and object.
