The Fiction of Content

Guardia Civil from the series "Spanish Village" © W. Eugene Smith

A friend getting started in photography after abandoning a previous career wrote to me recently. No texts should be presented with photographs, he asserted, because the images should be able to convey their content completely. Accompanying photography with text was a sign that the images lacked something. He's from Philly, so I'm correcting his English to present his argument to you.

His comments are common and raise two fundamental questions of our medium: can photography alone communicate an idea clearly and what is the expected role of text provided by the photographer (or a selected surrogate writer) in terms of presenting content?

The observer can receive many ideas from staring at a photograph. It's part of why we look. The possibility of communicating an exact thematic agenda strictly through the image is a separate question.

Photography alone communicates specific ideas from creator to observer poorly, like catching the news through the crackle of static. Why? First, photography presents a truth value it does not actually have. Ron Jude said it well in a recent interview with Mark Alice Durant when he talked about "the space between what photographs promise to deliver and what is actually communicated."

This is probably part of what caused a lot of us to fall in love with photography and tattoo a Rolleiflex on our leg: it is reality as quicksilver, it's the manipulation of reality through lens choice, framing, exposure, and other decisions necessary to create a two dimensional image from three-dimensional reality, and the creation of an image that retains the trace of reality, yet becomes something else. That "something else" is sometimes close to where it began, sometimes very far from it.  Photography cannot communicate specific ideas well because while it works with reality as its source, it is mediated and ultimately muted by all that is stripped from it through this process of converting real life observations to ink or silver gelatin on a piece of paper.

As a vehicle of reality photography is an unreliable witness, perhaps especially because it retains this reality trace. It's a very good liar. It contains recognizable traces of the reality from which it started its path of transmutation, yet ultimately remains linked to reality through formal traces, not an actual physical connection.

Second, photography communicates specific ideas poorly because no matter how exacting the photographer is in their use of visual signifiers, he or she cannot control their audience once a photograph is released into the public sphere, they cannot control the context in which it is seen and cannot determine the social context it performs within. Context determines a reading of any object and context inherently changes. This results in a photograph evolving meaning over time and between viewing spaces. This idea was explored at length on this site here so I'll avoid retyping it out at length again, but in a sentence, a photograph can change meaning for us based on how it's printed, if it's seen online or in print, the information we know about its maker, if it's seen during war or peace and a myriad of other contextual factors.

If photography cannot communicate concrete ideas clearly because it is an unreliable witness and the visual elements it uses to convey meaning change based on how, when and why we view it, then just what does that tell us about the role of text provided by the photographer to accompany their images?

It depends on the intended use of the image. If the goal is to communicate a specific narrative or story, I think we've given up completely on the idea photography can do that and simply written out what it is that images can't tell us – see Agee and Evans, Lange and Taylor. Reread Szarkowski talking about futility of W. Eugene Smith's work to show the life and poverty of Deleitosa, Spain in 17 images which he believed strained the medium beyond its capabilities.

For more contemporary examples, we have the Sochi Project and the long essay that accompanies the photographs in LaToya Ruby Frazier's The Notion of Family. Look at the Everyday (Asia, Africa, Latin America, etc) projects and how images they post are often accompanied by a long (for Instagram) text that describes the image.

In this way, we see confirmation in the opposite: the limited capacity of photography to communicate the specific can be seen in what text is asked to do. We also see that in contemporary photojournalism and documentary photography the belief in photography to be strong enough to carry the specific has collapsed. The limited capacities of photography to communicate information are supported by text (as well as video clips, found object scans, historical documents, you name it). Its role is clear.

On the other end of the spectrum from this type of observational photography, text is also embedded in the presentation of conceptual work for reasons that seem clear, so I'm going to avoid getting into it here for brevity's sake.

This leads me to talk about the way text functions with all the work in the middle of the spectrum and the reason why I sat down to type this out to you'se guys (sorry, I lived in Philly for a while too). The work I am referring to is contemporary art photography made largely in the observation-documentary mode. It's much of the work seen on independent sites, including this one. It's the work Carl Gunhouse describes as being spawned from a cross of work by Alec Soth and Roe Ethridge.

Photographers in this dominant vein are commonly writing about elements in the work that just aren't there. They are overreaching with the texts on their own work, trying to make their photography do more than it can, staking claims it can't sustain. They are using text to string together a bunch of images and using text to take responsibility for their themes instead of being exacting from their work. The result is a diminishing of the photography as the observer discovers it cannot do what the text wishes it did.

This is the "Fiction of Content," the textual invention of what is in the photography.

One can guess at the reasons for this trend: the dominance of "the project," the demand by photography distributors for thematic coherence in the project, the expectation that the project be accompanied by a strong statement that avoids generalities and the rise of intellectualism in photography generally in the last four decades.

The expectation of the accompanying statement creates an inherent risk for this type of work - we are asked to be specific with words about photography that in many cases aims to evoke rather than describe. For many photographers, the temptation is too strong - the statement becomes a quicksand of false claims. Statements can illuminate. Many photographers do their photography proud with their writing. Read the accompanying texts at galleries, read the press releases from major presses, read the essays at the back of the photobook, however, and look at the work afterwards and tell me how much of what is claimed by the text is actually in the images. Often, it's very little. While specific examples are called for, I'm going to chicken out. No need to pick fights.

I disagree with my friend from Philly. Text accompanying photography, even when it's not working on a specific, observational narrative, has a place, but the goal of good writing about one's photography or about the photography of others for a website, photobook or gallery is to leave the observer with questions and excitement about the work that they can then dig into the work to satisfy. It's goal is to resonate with and accompany the images, to work in parallel. It is not the goal of writing accompanying texts to explain the work so that we are left feeling we know the work before we've seen it or, worse and more common these days, to say more than the photography itself does.

Narrative and Photography

Photography's relationship with narrative has been heavily questioned for several decades and continues to provoke donnybrooks and end friendships. It's a relationship that has been particularly interesting for me to consider recently as I work on two photobooks.

The experience of doing so has led me to an unexpected conclusion: there are ways to consider the question of narrative in photography in which photography can be presented as the most powerful narrative vehicle in the arts. This is because a series of photographs has a strong and unique relationship with the way we form memories and, subsequently, how we string together memories to create our life narratives.

Before I start, I should say that if there are two basic ways to think about narrative in photography – either being provided all at once (Rejlander, Crewdson, Wall) or in parts (as in the photobook or serial photographic essays) - this essay references the second of these ways.

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I think it's worth briefly reflecting on how differently narrative has been talked about by a handful of important contributors to the conversation on photography.

John Szarkowski challenged the ability of photography to explain large-scale public subjects in both the preface to The Photographer's Eye (1966) and in Mirrors and Windows (1978). In The Photographer's Eye he wrote, "Photography has never been successful at narrative" and he declared the fields of photojournalism and documentary non-effectual in Mirrors and Windows writing, "Photography's failure to explain large public issues has become increasingly clear...Most issues of importance cannot be photographed." He believed attempts to photograph World War II were unable to explain events without heavy captioning and that W. Eugene Smith's efforts to characterize the historic culture of the Spanish village Deleitosa in seventeen photographs pushed the medium beyond its capacity.

In a 2010 interview with current Museum of Modern Art Director of Photography Quentin Bajac, Luc Delahaye shows how the critical questioning of narrative's role in photography has continued. He said, "The refusal of narration in photography probably leads to a 'vision' of the world, not to mention richer formal possibilities."

Other photographic thinkers such as Charlotte Cotton and Alec Soth, on the other hand, have accepted the potential for narrative in photography. In The Photograph as Contemporary Art, Cotton explores the idea of narrative in tableau photography and she also discusses how - in contrast - most mid-20th century narrative photography played out sequentially. Soth, in a 2013 conversation at Paris Photo Los Angeles with Roe Ethridge remarked, "I actually want to continue to tell stories. And I'm trying to figure out how to do that with photography because it's not always natural to the medium."

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I wonder if the conversation can't be shaken up by moving its focus from results to process; that is to say, away from whether it's possible to convey a particular narrative to another person through photography to whether photography can actively involve both the photographer and observer in creating narrative.

To do so, let's first mention movies and literature which would seem the most narrative-friendly artistic vehicles. Beginning, middle, end. Linear progression. Large amounts of information spread across a few hours of images and sound or reading hundreds of pages of description and dialogue. A story may double back on itself or include flashbacks, but at the end of the work of cinema or literature, almost inevitably a particular story has been conveyed to the viewer or reader by the director or author.

The observer, however, is frequently in a passive, receptive mode in terms of narrative creation – that is to say, we receive the given narrative. We may have to make leaps of thought and keep up with the twists, but generally we are doing so in order to receive a singular, specific narrative from the director or author that is driven by a rich density of data.

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Think of a memory you have of a particular event, an important one. Where you were when the Challenger exploded? What do you remember of your high school graduation? Your first day of work?

What do you remember about that day or that moment?

What form do those memories take?

I’ve had a number of conversations the last few months with people about this question. There are a lot of constants that have come out of those conversations. There is almost never sound or dialogue as we replay memories in our minds of an event and frequently the visual images we have are either stills or something approaching soundless GIFs - several seconds of action that stops and might loop. Frequently an entire event is represented by a single still image. The image or images are often seen from something approximating a camera's viewpoint.

What apparently never happens is a cinematic or literary presentation of narrative – a coherent thread resembling a movie complete with sounds progressing forward through a fixed duration of time or a similarly linear literary presentation of narrative with dialogue and descriptions.

Our narrative memories of a single event, then, are a single image or a handful of still images or a GIF, almost always without sound or spoken dialogues - unless it was crucial to the story, like car tires skidding before an accident – that we piece together in our mind and, frequently, see from the perspective of a camera. Our minds seem to be built in some ways to use still images as signifiers of events or moments, to index an entire event with a snapshot.

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Moving outwards, think about the memories you have of last year. What were your highlights? What was memorable? Important?

As I type this, my mind slowly begins to remember my own year…in October I went to visit my parents in Florida. Was that the only time I went to the States last year? No! I was in New York and Philadelphia in the summer. I have a vision of Yaron's son Oren dancing at a BBQ. A still view of The New York Times news center. Alberto standing in the rain, taking a break from helping me grade the backyard in Philadelphia. Laying on the inflatable bed at Amani's waiting for Ana to arrive.

Where else did I go…I went to the Darién Gap…was that last year? Yes, it was in Janu…Febru…January. Who did I go with? Simon! An image of him and Luisa walking out of the hotel in Acandí. A man falling from a cliff into a swimming hole, miraculously not hurting himself. On the Darién trip I met Juan Pablo…which reminds me of standing outside his house at night in San Félix later in the year, so high in the mountains that the clouds formed around me as I stood outside at night. I have a short loop memory of a cloud forming...and a still image of the mural painted on his house.

Slowly, the year fills out more and more as I type. Images of people and places begin to create memories of events and represent them. All of these single images or small groups of images that represent events are then threaded together into the year's narrative. Some narrative structure begins to take place, but only to a point. I can't remember the sequence within many events or the sequence of a series of events. I am forgetting some of the big moments of the year while overemphasizing details. Some things that I remember probably happened the year before.

In short, the year doesn't come together from January to December clearly. I recall still images that represent specific events and connect them, then try to run a line through them as best I can to begin to form a narrative of my year from them. Large gaps of information exist between these images, however; most of the year is inaccessible to me already. Ultimately the whole year's narrative is defined by a few dozen distinct still images that represent events strung together in some kind of order that's most likely not actually very sequential in relation to how they were lived. They are loosely connected - mostly by having been lived by me - and distanced by a lot of empty space between them.

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The artistic experience that most closely resembles this sewing together of memory-images into a narrative is making or looking at photographic projects, exhibitions or books. It closely duplicates how we create and reference our memories and then turn memories into our personal narratives. While the photobook or exhibition usually present a given sequence, we have to actively make sense of that series of still images through associations, across large gaps of information, without implication of duration, without informative dialogue, music, or effects, while relying on - as compared to a movie or novel - a very small amount of information. It is we, the observer, who create duration, fill gaps, imagine sound, create logic and relationship and ultimately imagine narrative.

This relationship places the observer of the photographic exhibition, essay or photobook actively in a role that simulates how we build narrative from our own life memories. This similarity makes forming narratives from photographic works a powerful experience for the observer in the process of interpreting photographs - as well, I should add, as for the creator in the process of making the photographic project.

As a last, practical, note, a project that doesn’t give enough images or spreads them too far apart can leave us unable to connect them, creating an opaque project we can't enter by refusing us the process of narrative construction. In turn, a project that connects the dots itself for us looses the special narrative privilege of photography we've identified and more closely approximates the dictated narrative of cinema or literature. Mark Steinmetz has said it well: "Photographers who are too controlling come up with pictures where the viewer has little free will - the experience of looking at the photo is over-determined and so there's not so much lasting pleasure."

A balanced sequence, in turn, gives us the dots spaced just enough apart to allow us to participate by connecting them for ourselves, to form our own conclusion of meaning of the work as active participants, and to tap photography's powerful mimesis of how we form our own life narratives from memories. This unique overlap makes narrative one of photography's strengths, not one of its weaknesses.

How to Start a Project: Steven Ahlgren

© Steven Ahlgren, Interstate Highway, Ridley Park, PA, 2012

Two years ago, I asked a handful of friends in the photography world if they had advice about starting projects for my students. I continue to present their responses to students each semester.

It occurred to me that their collective advice would probably be of interest to others and under that idea I will be publishing some of the responses I received then as well as soliciting new responses to post a series of a dozen replies from photographers to the basic question, "What advice do you have for starting a project?"

We started the series with replies from Judith Joy Ross, Irina Rozovsky, Alejandro Cartagena, and Phil Toledano. Today we follow with a response from Steven Ahlgren.

Ahlgren is a Pennsylvania-based photographer whose work has been shown internationally and published in DoubleTake, The New York Times, Harpers Magazine, The Boston Globe, and Adbusters. His images are in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and the Yale University Sterling Library. He is a graduate of the Yale MFA program. He was interviewed by Amy Stein on her blog in 2009 here and by Evan Sklar in the same year here.

Steven Ahlgren: There are different ways for me that projects come about. For my series on corporate life I knew generally what I wanted to photograph before beginning, but things went in different directions once I started making images. I began by photographing corporate cocktail parties. This eventually led to photographing inside offices, and then these pictures led unexpectedly to photographing corporate exteriors and pedestrians. The point is that once you start something, be open to where it may lead.

On the other hand my current project – which I still consider kind of amorphous and can only describe as the physical and social landscape of the car - came about in a much different way. I was looking at photographs of mine that I liked but that were not made with any project in mind. I found the theme only after looking at these photos and realizing many were connected. My interest in the subject was always there but I didn't realize it until spending time with the images. Only after making this discovery did I begin to go out and make pictures specifically for this project. Even now, however, I still don’t know precisely what I am looking for when I go out to photograph. This situation can be either liberating or frustrating depending on my point of view at that moment.

I remember comments from two people I greatly respect that relate to both of these approaches. The German photographer Michael Schmidt wrote in an interview in his book Irgendwo that he needs three to five years to complete a project. The first couple years are spent intuitively making photos without a clear objective. Often the work looks different than what he planned. Oftentimes he is confused. But by the simple act of going out and making photos it helps to clarify what it is he is really after.

The other comment comes from photographer/curator John Szarkowski in a documentary about his life in photography. He mentions briefly near the end of the film that often students (and I think all photographers) sometimes don’t have any idea what to photograph. His advice is to simply start making photographs – even if the initial subject is something you might only be slightly interested in. When you are stuck, try to figure it out through working and responding to what you have made, instead of trying to resolve the answer in your head before you pick up a camera.

Finally, I also have to remind myself not to always think and work in terms of PROJECTS. It has been my experience that there are many random, unrelated, wonderful pictures to be made as I go through my days and it would be a shame not to make these photographs because they don’t fit into what I might think is important at that time.

© Steven Ahlgren, Political Poster, Wilmington, DE, 2012

Progress and Problems, Part III

In posts one and two I’ve argued progress matters in art photography, but that we need to change how we consider the idea of progress to fit the contemporary historical moment. Today I want to build on those ideas and move into an article by Joerg Colberg on Conscientious that has generated conversation entitled "The digital revolution has not happened (yet)."

Colberg’s post boils down to an intriguing question: just where are the digital-based projects that take advantage of the inherent properties offered by a new technology to push the boundaries of the medium in ways not possible with analog?

I’d like to respond by first framing expectations. Whatever truly revolutionary element I would hold out for in the digital era for photography I would place in the broader impact of digital technology on the field and culture, and not in the actual making of images.

The digital era has brought massive change to photography, in how we make images and how we distribute images. Given this is obvious, let’s just list a few changes, some of which Colberg mentions in his article as well: the rise of citizen photojournalism, online image sharing, an exponential increase in images created, the further democratization of photography by lowering the bar of technical proficiency and costs, the embedding of metadata in images, and the explosion in the number of photographers considering themselves professional and the subsequent destruction of the traditional commercial photography market.

The main consequences of the digital era on photography have been broadly established by now and will continue to profoundly influence our medium for decades. This – in my view – was the “revolution” part of the digital revolution. No sense messing around with words, let’s light the fire: I believe that the “digital revolution” has largely happened already in photography through broader impacts on the field, not the actual production of individual projects and images.

In terms of projects and image-production, digital forms another link in an ongoing historical chain - dry plates, Brownie, Leica, Polaroid, etc. - and now digital. This chain has been about making cameras smaller, cheaper, more portable, and easier to use and digital has generally been developed, approached, and used in line with these expectations of previous new technologies. All have tried to maintain the quality of image of previous generations of cameras as much as possible while making photography more convenient. The Brownie, for example, put a camera in a lot more middle-class hands; that was its revolution. Similarly, dry plates eliminated the hassle of mixing chemicals in the field allowing more people to take more photographs and for them to travel to new places to take them. This was its revolution; not a particular photographer or project.

So in terms of expectations from a digital revolution, I'm not holding out for something shockingly new and shiny in terms of a project or image or a new genre of photography. What I hope for is an increase in the use of digital photography to create new form and content that harnesses the advantages of a new technology to speak in a new way that move the lines of visual communication forwards. I think that is possible with individual photographers and projects.

This brings us back to Colberg's question: where ARE the projects taking advantage of the properties of this new technology to create content? He’s on to something. There aren’t many.

As an exercise – how many 35mm digital photography fine art projects can you think of? And inside of that group, how many could not have been made with an analog camera and how many are actually using the new opportunities digital offers to create images (not including post-production manipulation that’s a whole other conversation)?

Not many. Why is this?

First off, this question doesn't ask about projects investigating the medium itself – projects where the subject is digital glitch or fringing, halos and strange digital color. Those types of projects are horrible necessary investigations of technology, but aren’t what we’re getting at.  There are a number of these projects already, and I believe projects where technology is also the subject are of limited potential as an avenue headed “forward” because they don’t use the new technology to say something new in terms of visual communication.

In exchange, going with Colberg's example of Nan Goldin we have someone who used the advantages of a smaller, cheaper, more portable technology to work with her everyday life and relationships. That’s what we’re after – the weaving of technological change into new form and content, projects that have been allowed by a technology that are not exploring the media itself, but exploiting the smaller size and increased portability and new aesthetic features of the newest camera evolution to create fresh visual communication.

There are some great projects that work with digital cameras, though not perhaps as many as you would expect. Elinor Carucci, Mark Powell, Phil Toledano to start a list. These projects, however, don’t answer Colberg’s call to take advantage of the inherent possibilites of digital – all could have been made with analog. One project that I believe DOES use digital capabilities to create new content is “a shimmer of possibility.” Paul Graham uses the high burst capability of the digital camera to create questions around “the moment,” framing, and the relationship of cameras to cinema that would have been hard, if not impossible, to pull off with an analog camera and a motor drive. This, however, even if true, is an exception to the rule.

Part of the reason might be the fact that digital cameras haven’t completely followed the trends of technological innovations of the past. Digital SLR cameras are not actually cheaper, more portable, or smaller than analog cameras. Only digital point-and-shoots and cell phone cameras continue the technological trend of smaller, cheaper, more portable and those cameras, at this point, continue to have fairly severe quality limitations. Perhaps when time brings them more quality, projects will be generated that use their inherent abilities to provide new form and content. Additionally, the larger digital SLR’s do offer ISO advantages, burst modes, perhaps facial recognition technology...but we’ll run out of items on this list quickly. Digital isn’t THAT much different from analog in terms of the ways a camera makes images.

Moving beyond a few speculations around the new technology itself, I think we are more likely to find answers hidden in the implied question behind Colberg’s question. He uses the conversation around the lack of projects taking advantage of digital properties to hint at something broader - why does photography feel “stagnant and anemic” today?

A qualifying statement is necessarily before I reply. First, there are a lot of great images being created right now, as Colberg says as well in his post. I would say there are probably more quality images being made today than at any point in history on a year-to-year basis give the sheer volume of photographers, the level of visual sophistication we’ve developed during the last 150 years, and the variety of modes of working available to us today as established over the course of photographic history.

So the question of “stagnant and anemic” isn’t about the quality of images; I think it's rather about the way those images relate very closely to images of the past and to each other, about how they orient themselves. Why do we seem to see the same projects over and over? The same types of images? And especially when we’ve just been handed a major new technological toy?

As I’ve said in parts I and II of this post, there needs to be an understanding that progress will be more limited in photography as photography grows older as a medium, and that progress is about a creation of fresh modes of working and visual communication by a photographer, not a movement. The situation needs to be considered correctly in terms of expectation and history.

That being said, let’s get to a list of possible answers to Colberg's question that I hope will provide for reply posts and further conversation on other sites. I would eventually like to expand on some of the following points as well as separate posts.

Not in any particular order:

1. Group-think due to social media and the centralization of information. As a cut-and-paste from a question I asked Blake Andrews in an interview recently: The social dynamic of the photography community in comparison with other visual art forms is a very particular and highly developed one. There are very few painting or sculpture blogs in comparison with photography blogs. Photographers also seem to me much more active on Twitter and other social media forms than other visual artists. And I'm not aware of an equivalent to online discussion spaces like the Flak Photo Network for other art forms.

With all this in mind, I think of a quote from a recent interview with photographer Gregory Halpern: "Photographers can sometimes be the most conservative and least ambitious of visual artists."

I'm wondering if all this connectivity, all this common intake of information, all this drinking from the same well results to a degree in homogeneity of thought and more of a tendency for group-think than other artists in other art forms. Why is the photography community so integrated socially as compared with other mediums? Is this something that makes us more prone to being conservative in our thinking, to homogenization and to group-think?

2. The limited guardians of the gate. Photographers attend reviews that don't exist for other art forms that in large part are about networking. Many of the same reviewers appear at Santa Fe, Photolucida, FotoFest, etc. The number of major photography blogs is actually fairly small, a dozen or two. Thankfully we’re not in the John Szarkowski era (nothing against him at all) in which a single person is really the definer of what is considered quality and contemporary in photography. However, the people in charge of selecting work to show in well-considered venues is not very large – and they mostly know each other and I believe are influenced at least to a degree by each other. We remain a community of too few guardians, and a lot of those guardians have a fairly similar vision.

If you give me a photograph, I think I can pretty much tell you if a certain blog or reviewer or gallerist or editor will respond to it and thereby predict your “success.” On top of that - and this is where the problem lies - the image's chances of success are fairly consistent across many of those venues. Seen a lot of the same names across a lot of sites, galleries, and at the top of awards lists? Out of hundreds of thousands of photographers? That’s not good.

3. Issues in the broader cultural zeitgeist. As John Armstrong noted in the recent Flak Photo Books conversation based in Gerry Badger’s “The Pleasure of Good Photographs” and as Colberg noted in his reference to Simon Reynolds, there is an almost fascinating lack of cultural movement in the 2000s across all disciplines, not just photography.

Think of how quickly you can associate music and art and a cultural atmosphere with the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s...now try the 2000s. It’s not for a lack of issues – September 11th, Obama, the Arab Spring, the US involvement in two wars, global warming, religious warfare, the dawn of smart phones.

4. The Numbers Game. I am not sure how the increase in the number of photographers is actually affecting photography production, but I am sure that it is.

On one hand, I can believe that to differentiate themselves, photographers are more than ever searching for new modes, new forms, new ground in order to claim space in the contemporary landscape.

On the other hand, I can equally believe photographers are scared by the numbers game into conservatism. To find acceptance and modest reward, I think a lot of photographers ape a type of work they’ve seen, ending with a formulaic conservatism to their visual ideas. This gives the impression of seeing the same project repeatedly, or seeing an image and being able to believe one of three dozen photographers could have produced it.

5. The Moat Theory. I believe part of why the art world sticks to medium and large format film has to do with keeping a barrier between themselves and the masses. How do you create a unique visional idea against the billions of digital images created every day, many of which will be more interesting than what any one single photographer can make? By not playing the game and keeping away from digital completely. Stay with equipment that’s more expensive and less convenient and therefore less used that produces a different “look” from the masses. The flip side to this is a lot of art photography is now using the same tools resulting in a similar look, even with a wider choice of potential tools.

This also, helpfully, allows us to produce larger prints that gallery’s can then theoretically make more money from, making us a more marketable commodity.

6. Problems of geographic diversity. Who’s your favorite Colombian photographer? Favorite Israeli? Favorite Egyptian? Favorite Brazilian...that's not named Salgado or Rio Branco? Ironically, in the digital era of information-sharing, there is far too little work being produced outside of the US and Europe being seen internationally. How many photo blogs focus on South America? On Africa? On South Asia?

Living in Colombia, I can say first-hand that it’s to a degree about volume and quality of production, but that the bigger problem is that what is being produced is not being distributed. The last true barrier in photography is geography.

Sadly, I also believe the aforementioned moat theory, to the degree that it's true, also has an unintended consequence. The line drawn between art photography and the digital masses also largely cuts off the international photography world who works digitally and in 35mm, resulting in a more homogenized photographic vision. Photographers from parts of the world beyond the US and Europe are frequently cut off from medium and large format as a possible mode of working by a lack of ability to purchase and use supplies. As a case study, I live in a Latin American city of over two million people and there is not one lab in the city for me to develop medium or large format film. I believe this results in work from these areas being seen by some - but absolutely not all - venues as less serious.

7. The Hustle. Photographers are being increasingly asked to pay for promotional materials by galleries, pay to publish our books, pay for portfolio reviews, pay for contests, pay for the chance to have someone look at our work, rent the gallery space...all of these expenditures may be making us more conservative in terms of what we produce, especially in combination with the idea of the limited number of guardians of the gates. Given how expensive photography is as a medium and how more and more expenses are being shifted to photographers from galleries and publishers, it makes sense to make your expenditures count by looking at present models of success and producing work you believe a gallery will be interested in showing or a publisher in publishing.

8. The Watered Down Theory. It’s possible that there is just as much imagery being created that is pushing against trends and creating visual progress, but that today we have to sift through so much material that it feels like stagnancy.

This is a starting point list of possible ideas; I'm sure that there is more to be added. This post has gotten long - I will cut this off here, but will make a summary post taking into account all three of these other posts hopefully later this week.

Shifting Lines: The Increasing Consideration of Documentary Photography and Photojournalism as Fine Art Photography, Part II

© Abraham Zapruder, film still from John F. Kennedy assassination, 1963

This post starts where yesterday's left off. These posts collectively are an examination of how the 1970s in particular played an important role in forming the contemporary photographic landscape of more elastic and overlapping definitions between documentary photography, fine art photography, and photojournalism that we live in today.

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During the 1970s documentary photography and photojournalism increasingly infiltrated the art world. A number of factors combined to accelerate this development.

John F. Kennedy's assassination in November 1963 is often cited as the beginning of television’s ascendency as the primary source of news for increasing numbers of people. The tragic day in Dallas entered the American memory through televised images and news coverage as much as by photography and radio broadcasts. Sales of televisions accelerated during the mid-1960s and by the beginning of the 1970s televised news coverage had surpassed newspapers and magazines as the public’s major source for news.

Television took so much advertising revenue from newspapers and news magazines that many print venues collapsed, including the great picture magazines such as Life, which folded in 1972. With the pressure placed on the print industry by television, magazines and newspapers increasingly looked only to the bottom line for editorial decisions, and cut many photographic projects. As Louis Baltz writes, "In 1945 Americans communicated the appearance of the world's great events to each other through the medium of still photography; by 1975, by and large, they did not." (Louis Baltz, "American Photography in the 1970s," American Images: Photography 1945-1980, 157)

uncredited image from the site www.yesterdaysmagazines.com

At the same time the economics of the magazine and newspaper industries limited options for photographers in photojournalism and documentary photography, an economic infrastructure developed to help support photographers as artists. Opportunities for displaying photography as fine art work expanded, museums began to include photographs as art more frequently in their collections and exhibitions, developments in printing allowed photographer's to use artist's books as a cost-effective forum for distributing their work, the National Endowment for the Arts provided funding for many fine art photographers, and universities hired many photographers as professors in the expanding field of secondary education in photography.

After the closing of Alfred Steiglitz’s gallery 291 in New York in 1917, few U.S. galleries in the following decades showed photography and none exhibited photography exclusively. The Limelight Gallery in New York City and Carl Siembab’s gallery on Newbury Street in Boston showed photography and occasionally held one-person exhibitions of photographers, but it was not until 1969 that Lee Witkin successfully opened the first commercially viable New York art gallery exclusively showing photography as fine art work. During the 1970s a large and active market for contemporary photography developed and Baltz recounts that, "While it was extremely difficult to see photographs exhibited as art on New York gallery walls in 1967, by 1977 it was extremely difficult not to." (159) 

John Szarkowski, from the page www.obit-mag.com

By the 1970s, the photographic print had been firmly established as a unique and collectable object by museums, a process that aided in the raising of market value for photographs. John Szarkowski helped to complete the transformation of the photographic print into an art object, a “passage from multiplicity, ubiquity, equivalence to singularity, rarity, and authenticity.” (Christopher Phillips, "The Judgement Seat of Photography," The Contest of Meaning, 16)

Szarkwoski replaced Edward Steichen as director of the photography department of the museum in 1962 and also replaced Steichen’s legacy of disregard of the qualities of the “fine print” by combining two ideas of Steichen’s predecessor, Beaumont Newhall. Newhall’s early articulation of a program for the isolation and expert judging of the merit of photographs based on aesthetic factors intrinsic to photography allowed for the print to be seen as a singular, unique work, not as a mechanically reproducible item. In Newhall’s vision, an anointed expert - such as himself - could use self-enclosed and self-referential aesthetic factors separate from real world events to judge photographs as works of art. During the second phase of his career, Newhall approached prints with the supposition of creative expression in their making. This not only allowed photographs made outside of the art world to be included as part of art photography history - such as those of Mathew Brady and Charles Marville - it also provided an argument for the uniqueness of the photographic print for Szarkowski to build from in its submission that “each print is an individual personal expression.” (22)

© Mathew Brady, Confederate dead behind a stone wall at Fredericksburg, VA, ca. 1860- ca. 1865

Szarkowski brought back both Newhall’s idea of the expert assessment of formal factors and the supposition of creative intent in the making of the photographic print as part of his ambitious attempt to establish photography in its own aesthetic practice. Szarkowski’s creation of “cult value,” as Walter Benjamin described it in his seminal 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” around the photographic print helped to reorder photography along the lines of other media in museums by establishing a sense of rarity and “aura” around the individual photograph.

This elevation of the print, in turn, helped to commodify photographs and govern a market for prints by defining and limiting the production of the original, which in turn helped solidify art photography as a financially successful gambit for gallery owners and artists. Peter Galassi, the recently retired veteran curator of the museum’s Department of Photography, shows the continued triumph of Szarkowski’s belief in the print as a unique object by claiming that “a photographic print is a much less predictable product than a print from an engraving or an etching plate” and in his belief that the likelihood of a photographer’s being “able truly to duplicate an earlier print is very slight.” (16)

In addition to the increase in opportunities to show work in galleries and museums and the establishment of a market for the photographic print as a unique object, photographers began to use the advent of cheaper printing methods such as pad printing, laser printing, dot matrix printing, and inkjet printing to publish their own books in the 1970s in order to claim a role beyond the major presses. W. Eugene Smith, for example, often showed work in Life magazine, but after its closure he published a final version of Minamata, his project on the mercury pollution of a Japanese fishing village, as a book in 1975. Increasingly, funding for book projects came from small presses, independent grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, and photographic equipment companies such as Hasselblad, as well as from the photographers themselves, allowing for the viability of the book form as a replacement for magazines as a venue for photographers. (Mary Panzer, Things as They Are, 25) Baltz describes the situation:

               Another development in American photography during the 1970's was the unprecedented
               quantity and quality of photographers' and artists' publications, some in the form of portfolios
               of original prints, some in the traditional form of a monograph by an established publishing
               house, but most often, in the form of inexpensively printed, self-published 'artist's bookworks'
               that dealt with a single subject or theme. (Baltz 160)

© W. Eugene Smith, from Minamata

As galleries, museums, and books provided new venues for photographers and prints rose in price as they became defined as unique objects, the National Endowment for the Arts provided grants to artists at unprecedented levels and universities added photography courses and programs in the 1970s allowing more room for photographers to make a living as fine artists. The NEA, before the ideological battles surrounding grants given to controversial artists such as Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe in the early 1990s, gave money to a significant number of photographers to help them support projects. As for working in higher education as a means of subsistence in the 1970s, Baltz writes, "Higher education was becoming both a major educator and employer of serious photographers. It is probable that teaching had supplanted commercial or magazine work as the 'other' work of most serious photographers by the mid-1970s." (157)

Szarkowski gave another reason for photography's changes in the 1970s. He fundamentally refuted the ability of photography to explain large-scale public issues and stories such as the Vietnam War or the ability of photo essays such as Margaret Bourke-White's attempt to explain the effects of World War II. "Most issues of importance cannot be photographed," he said, declaring the fields of photojournalism and documentary non-effectual in his influential Mirrors and Windows (1978). (Marien 382) Szarkowski believed, for example, that W. Eugene Smith’s efforts to characterize the historic culture of a Spanish village in seventeen photographs pushed the medium beyond its capacity. Szarkowski also pointed to “photography’s failure to explain large public issues” such as the Vietnam War. (382) He wished to cordon off art photography from the encroachments of mass culture by introducing a formalist vocabulary for examining the visual structure supposedly inherent in photographs and by denying the ability of a string of images to convey a narrative in the way that text can.

Szarkowski's comments, in a way, reflect a now long-standing trend towards a disbelief in photography which became widespread after World War II and continues today, an erosion of confidence represented by the long-standing debate about the authenticity of Robert Capa's Death of a Loyalist Soldier and other World War II images. This loss of confidence helped to create a distance between documentary photography and photojournalism and their traditional roles, facilitating their consideration as works of art or personal expression.

In sum, the 1970s brought together a confluence of factors that built on the historic flexibility of the ideas of documentary photography and photojournalism, their approximations to other photographic genres over time, and their early crossings into fine arts to further their ultimate inclusion as part of the fine arts world. We can easily imagine this quote from photographic historian Lili Corbus Bezner to include fine art photography as well: “Photographic categories such as 'documentary' or 'photojournalism' are not necessarily or immediately obvious to viewers; often we must be told which is which, a function of textbooks, museums, gallery owners, critics and historians. A single image can belong to more than one category, or its characteristics may change through time.” (Bezner 2) This process of shifting lines between genres, building over the course of the medium's history, was perhaps inevitable for an adaptable and experimental medium, considered to be both a truth and a lie, never sharply delineated as an art or a science.

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A coda to this post / paper that follows these trends through the 1990s will be published early next week.

Opinion: Pantall, Colberg, Hoepker and Understanding Images

© Thomas Hoepker

Colin Pantall and Joerg Colberg have both recently discussed the above photograph taken by Magnum's Thomas Hoepker on September 11th, 2011.

Pantall uses the image to point to the problem of the narrow emotional range accepted in the responses of photographic subjects to a situation, as well as the difficulty many people have coping with something beyond the simplest of narratives in a photograph. I would continue his points by adding that there's a problem with the assumption that it is possible to come to any correct reading of the emotional state of photographic subjects and in believing we can correctly conclude the narrative of a photograph in any way.

Hoepker makes these very mistakes about his own image. In a New York Times op-ed column by Frank Rich, written in 2006 on the fifth anniversary of September 11th, he's quoted as saying about this image, "They were totally relaxed like any normal afternoon...It’s possible they lost people and cared, but they were not stirred by it." Slate writer David Plotz makes the same mistakes in a rejection of Rich's column: "The subjects are obviously engaged with each other, and they're almost certainly discussing the horrific event unfolding behind them. They have looked away from the towers for a moment not because they're bored with 9/11, but because they're citizens participating in the most important act in a democracy—civic debate...They came to this spot to watch their country's history unfold and to be with each other at a time of national emergency."

Hoepker and Plotz both assert singular, different, yet conclusive readings of what is going on in the image: "they were totally relaxed"..."they were not stirred"..."they have looked away...because"...and finally "they came to this spot to watch." These assertions of being able to give a factual reading of the events portrayed in the image is problematic; all conversation about a photograph needs to be framed as conjecture. Short of finding the subjects and photographer and asking, we cannot actually know what was happening or why an image was taken - and even their words can be questioned; memories are fickle, we all have agendas.

Colberg follows up on Pantall's post by asserting that a photographer's intentions can't be known and that we observe photographs with inherent biases: "We all like to think that the photographer’s intention inform the image and that when we look at a photograph we can see those intention. [sic] But if we ignore the simple fact that we have no way of knowing what the photographer’s intentions were (How would we know? All we have is a photograph), especially in a news context, we don’t just look at photographs, we look at them with our own sets of expectations (as Colin notes) and biases. We often see in photographs not what they show, but instead what we want to see."

I will add a question to the conversation - if the emotional state of the subjects and the narrative cannot be extracted from an image, and the photographer's intentions cannot be known, how about allegory and metaphor as a strategy for correctly reading images? Not if the word "correctly" is left in the sentence. Reading and concluding - or better yet, creating - the allegorical and metaphorical meaning in an image is informed by one's life experience and knowledge and a matter of subjective insights. As long as the observer remembers that their conclusions also remain in the realm of conjecture, however, metaphor and allegory can definitely be a way to analyze and discuss an image.

This is why I would take what I imagine is an unpopular position and defend Rich's column, even though I don't agree with his conclusions or his reading of the image. Unlike Hoepker and Plotz, Rich does not claim a truthful interpretation of the facts the image contains. Jonathan Jones writes in an article in The Guardian about the debate around Hoepker's image, "[Rich] saw in this undeniably troubling picture an allegory of America's failure to learn any deep lessons from that tragic day, to change or reform as a nation: 'The young people in Mr Hoepker's photo aren't necessarily callous. They're just American.'" And Plotz writes about Rich's column, "So they turned their backs on Manhattan for a second. A nice metaphor for Rich to exploit, but a cheap shot." That may be so, and we can attack the conclusion and the arguments Rich uses to construct it, but he avoids making conclusive factual statements about the image of the type that get both Hoepker and Plotz in trouble.

© Gregory Crewdson

Let's start to draw some conclusions from all of this with a few more questions.

If we agree it's not possible to know the true emotions or narrative of an image, nor the intentions of the photographer, and that allegory and metaphor need to be remembered as a subjective reading of an image, does that mean that Hoepker's image of 9/11 should be read in the same way as the above image by Gregory Crewdson?

Should all art photography, photojournalism and documentary photography be read in the same way?

Is a news image in The New York Times as "truthful" as one of Crewdson's constructions?

Do we know as little of the intentions of a advertising photographer making an image to sell a bar of soap as those of a photographer like Crewdson?

Is the answer that we just can't know anything about an image for sure, so all interpretations of it are equally valid?

I think Pantall gives us a way to answer these questions when he writes, "[We] want to reduce things to black and white and right and wrong dualities." To begin answering the questions above, we need to remind ourselves to avoid reducing our thinking about how to look at images to simple dualities - while going ahead and continuing to look at and discuss images. Photography does not allow us to make conclusive readings about images, yet it is part of our job as photographers, critics, curators, and writers on photography to attempt readings anyways. We investigate images and construct arguments for how an image could be read. We aggressively ask what is really going on, what the photographer's intentions are, what biases we have, and what meaning we can construct through allegory and metaphor. This is the foundation of using visual images for communication (and the root cause of really long grad school critiques).

© Nick Ut

Taking this point one more step, all readings of an image are not equally valid - it is not the case that because there is no photographic truth, all readings are therefore of equal value. The problem is that it's difficult to quantify the reasons why. A toddler does not deserve the same voice on an image's meaning as mine or yours. We have more experience looking at images, knowledge of context, life experience, and knowledge of history. My conclusion to all of this is we need to accept something I'll call spectrum reading. Spectrum reading would be the rejection of a duality that says because, for example, we can't know for sure the true emotional states of the children in the horrific Vietnam War image by Nick Ut seen above, they are therefore open to the same degree of speculation as the emotional states of the man and woman in the image by Crewdson. Or that the intentions of a photographer taking an image of a bar of soap are as vague as Crewdson's. Or that because we can't easily quantify the value of a particular response, that all are therefore equal.

We need to read the context of the image, take note of who the observer is, look at who is making the image and try to figure out why; we have to understand the accepted parameters for image manipulation in the media venue of the image, talk with friends and colleagues, etc...then we can make more (or less) intelligent arguments about an image and its meaning. The site Bag News regularly does a good job of this with political and news images. Pantall does this regularly on his site and did so here on this site a month ago looking at an image by the photographer Billy Monk. We can look for truth, argue about intention, divine metaphor - we just can't claim to be absolutely correct.

Lastly, I'm going to be a little more optimistic than both Pantall and Colberg on one final point. Pantall writes, "We are still not very sophisticated in our visual way of experiencing the world" and Colberg writes, "We don’t really understand photography." I'd like to suggest that although the ability to understand visual communication may not be as developed as with written communication, we're not where we were in decades past, either.

There has been a corrosion in the belief in the truth value of a photograph at least going back until World War II. John Szarkowski, the long-term director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, fundamentally refuted the ability of photography to explain large-scale public issues, such as Margaret Bourke-White's attempt to explain the effects of World War II in her photographic work. "Most issues of importance cannot be photographed," Szarkowski claimed, declaring the fields of photojournalism and documentary as non-effectual in his influential book, Mirrors and Windows (1978). His comments reflect a now long-standing trend towards doubt about photographic veracity which became widespread after World War II and continues today, an erosion of confidence represented by the debates about the authenticity of Robert Capa's Death of a Loyalist Soldier (below) and other World War II images. This loss of confidence has helped to create a distance between documentary photography and photojournalism and their traditional roles, facilitating their consideration as works of art or personal expression, an interesting conversation beyond the scope of this particular post.

© Robert Capa, Death of a Loyalist Soldier

This erosion of confidence in the truth of photographs is also seen in the almost immediate questions we have around the authenticity of an image like the one below. We see it, we question it's truthfulness. As the manipulation of photographs has grown, so has our own skepticism and disbelief - that is the foundation for a more sophisticated reading of images in our culture, an advancement in ability. We now largely understand that, "A snapshot can make mourners attending a funeral look like they're having a party," as Walter Sipser - the man on the right in Hoepker's photograph - wrote after reading Hoepker's comments on the image and Rich's column. We're still not a visually literate society, but we have a wider understanding of the power, lies, and meanings of images now than we did before.

Uncredited image from the Facebook page of "All Things METAL \m/"