With this blog my intention is to create a space for discussion and dialogue within the photographic community. Whether you are in agreement with the opinions or not, any and all commentary is encouraged. I am envisioning a new generation of the photographic forum- continuing on the tradition set forth by Baudelaire in his photographic criticisms, furthered by the retaliatory letters and divisive sentiments on photography between Henry Peach Robinson and Peter Henry Emerson, and even further defined by Alfred Stieglitz and company in Camera Work.
This is a new Century and a new generation of artists, and I believe that the blog forum is the new best way to carry out a lasting discussion between interested parties. As the magazine racks are full of techno-talk and adverts, and the newspapers becoming less of a tradition and more of a chore, the Internet becomes the place whereby almost anyone can have access and express a viewpoint. Unfortunately, a blog can easily succumb to what has become the norm of today's world, the "sound-bite" (or is it -byte?), where one does not develop a thought or idea but just jots down a couple of the more expressive words, barely formulating a sentence (it would be ridiculous to think that Emerson's letters in The Photographic News at the turn of the 19Th Century could be reduced to single-sentence talking points). Ah, but such is our world and such is the way we are familiar with reading and listening to news!
So, without creating a forum full only of single-line, point-by-point bulletins, I would like to utilize the way people think and write by encouraging any initial questions or opinions about a topic. By expressing these quick, short, or even blunt views within this type of open 24-7 forum, we can together create a more in-depth dialogue. Think of this as a classroom (I know, I know..."a classroom, but I just finished school!"), but a classroom without a teacher, full of individuals eager to each put in their own view; asking lots of questions, but also willing to spend time thinking and developing deeper sentiments and philosophies, not wanting the thinking to end at the sound-bite.
I guess we need to quickly mention things of no interest to me (and hopefully to you as well). To use one word...GEAR. I think this word pretty much sums up exactly what is off limits in this forum. I could care less about how many lights you had to use on your last shoot. I don't lose sleep over when the next new Canon SuperDigital Zoom Lens DeLuxe ver.14.2xp comes out. There are more than enough places on the Internet to discuss all that technology, and parts, and stuff, and GEAR. I don't want to get involved. So, no GEAR talk. I would also like to stay away from the whole realm of commercial photography, i.e. photography made by one person expressly for another person in return for money. I do want to discuss differing views on commercial photography, and how it fits into today's culture (Because it's impact is huge) but no silly banter about how you shot a wedding last week then dropped your flash drive in the toilet, but it was fine because you didn't yet erase the images from your card, and how if it were film you would have lost the whole roll...Forget it. I can't waste my time with all of that. This place needs to be about more than art school hallway talk (already had three years of that stuff). This is for real questions and real opinions like:
What is photography's role in society today? Or,
What impact does photography have on society?
What is photography?
The digital medium in inherently not photography.
Cropping images into altered frames is an untrue representation of the photographer's eye.
How important is process compared with product?
There, now that I have offended (Or at least riled up) half of my audience, let us discuss.
4 comments:
awwww, do you miss maria's class? and as far as 'gear talk' is concerned, i understand your disinterest in number of lights, and lastest, greatest digital accessories, but don't you think that sometimes the process by which a photograph is made (and process does include gear) is almost, if not just as important as the final piece? i know i do....
also, check out jessica's site here - jessicanotargiacomo.blogspot.com
she's in vietnam right now.
i appreciate what you are trying to dowith your blog. i quite agree with your desire to refrain from talking about gear. who in their right mind needs more of that? amusing though that you then proceed to bring up the issue of gear as a possible topic by proposing that digital capture is not photogaphy? hmmmm, do you mean to suggest that a person who records light using electronic sensors instead of a silver halide emulsion, is not a photographer? or is it that such a person is less of a photographer because of the gear they use? good heavens! are you a gearist?!!!
(Apologies in advance if this is a bit over the top, but I was trying to write it to the spirit of your manifesto!)
German critic Walter Benjamin (pronounced BEN-ya-meen), in his famous 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” observes of photography (and technical reproduction in general) that it has the capacity to “put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway…The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room.” Benjamin lived at a time when “the masses,” as he terms them, were demanding (and receiving) instant gratification through technology for the first time – everything that consumers once had to actively seek out would now be delivered into their homes through inventions including the telephone and the radio. Benjamin believes that when this expectation of universal and instant accessibility is expected of art (and beauty in general), it assaults the “aura” of art, by which he seems to mean the essence or authenticity of art, the awe we experience when in the presence of a unique work of art. Although the new reproduction technologies of photography or the phonograph (that would eventually unite to produce the movie) offered to democratize art that was once inaccessible to many (those who could not afford to travel to Vienna to hear the famed symphony orchestra could hear it from their homes), Benjamin argues that “To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose ‘sense of the universal equality of things’ has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.” What he is getting at here is that the uniqueness of the older arts (there’s only one Venus de Milo) becomes anathema to the new class of consumers who increasingly expect all their desires satiated for a fixed price. Photography and the phonograph make art accessible and acceptable to the masses. He also recognizes the power of these art forms to offer a solution to the seemingly inexorable treatment of art as ritual, which he views as “parasitic.” Art is no longer utilized by a “cult of beauty” in which one unique beautiful object is fetishized and imbued with magical qualities, but, rather, through its reproduction, art becomes appropriated by the realm of politics.
As in his other famous article, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”, Benjamin is maddeningly elusive in his observations. When we expect him to elucidate a point, he begins discussing something else (film rather than photography in this case). But his point seems to be that the function of art has shifted, and not in a necessarily bad way, through its mechanical reproduction. As a Marxist, Benjamin is quite pleased that “the greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation.” While in previous centuries only the elite would have had access to art, reproduction technology renders art accessible to nearly everyone.
Benjamin’s belief that art reflects the changing needs of particular epochs, he quotes André Breton asserting “the work of art is valuable only in so far as it is vibrated by the reflexes of the future,” in no way dictates a destruction or debasing of earlier art forms. I think it is useful to look back at Benjamin’s view of photography because he assigns it a specifically modern space in the realm of the arts – different in its inherent technological reproducibility from any of its predecessors and much closer to the then nascent art of film than to the traditional arts. Perhaps the contemporary dissenters of these new arts, whose comments Benjamin couches in his copious footnotes, are most instructive to us today. Their criticisms seem incredibly Luddite and myopic compared to Benjamin’s progressive acceptance of these transformative arts. Although I do not have a particularly strong opinion on how we should treat the advent of digital photography, I think we might be wise to look to Benjamin’s optimistic reception of traditional photography, which for so many of his contemporaries seemed to undermine the very cornerstones of what defined “art”. He both attempts to show the political power of an art that takes advantage of the fact that “the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw,” (which, of course, remains true today if we consider the power of the 9/11 photographs), while also reminding us of what photography cannot do but that its predecessorial art forms could: project an aura inherent in an original. It seems likely that digital photography represents just another of these shifts in the technology of art that are essential to art’s relevance to each generation that looks to it for meaning.
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