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.

Mexico Notebook: Interview with Laurence Salzmann

From the series "Echele Ganas" © Laurence Salzmann

Hannah Frieser, Jaime Permuth and I are collaborating to explore contemporary photography in Mexico. We're looking at trends and how they relate to traditions; events, institutions and venues; as well as pursuing conversations with curators, academics, gallerists and photographers on what's happening currently. This collaborative project will feature a variety of types of posts including interviews, book reviews, published letters, portfolios of images and more.

Hannah Frieser is a curator, photographer and book artist and former Executive Director of Light Work. Jaime Permuth is a Guatemalan photographer living and working in New York City and a Faculty Member at the School of Visual Arts.

Today we continue this series with an interview with Laurence Salzmann.

Laurence Salzmann is a native of Philadelphia who has worked as a photographer and filmmaker since the early 1960s. His projects document the lives of little known groups in America and abroad. He looks at the lives of people ranging from occupants of single room occupancy hotels in New York City to transhumant shepherds in Transylvania, residents of a Mexican village and Philadelphia Mummers. His photographic study of a nearly extinct Jewish community in Romania was published as The Last Jews of Radauti by Dial/Doubleday in 1983. His work from Cuba, La Lucha/The Struggle, and from Mexico entitled Echele Ganas: Do Your Best were both published by Blue Flower Press.

Salzmann's photographic method is deeply informed by his background in anthropology and involves long term participation in and observation of groups or events. His work illustrates how lives and events are shaped by the environments and conditions in which people live.

Other posts in this series include:
Interview with Diego Berruecos
Interview with Mariela Sancari
Q&A with Eduardo Jiménez Román
Q&A with Claudia Arechiga
Q&A with Nahatan Navarro
Contemporary Photography in Oaxaca
Q&A with Aglae Cortés
Q&A with Maria José Sesma
Interview with César Rodríguez
Q&A with Nora Gómez
Q&A with Melba Arellano
Q&A with Jorge Taboada

______________________________

From the series "Echele Ganas" © Laurence Salzmann

fototazo: You have a background in anthropology and have worked in photography and film since the 1960s. Talk with us a little about how you started.

Laurence Salzmann: I picked up my first camera a Brownie Hawkeye at age 11. I photographed things of the usual interest to an 11 year-old—the family pet cat and friends making faces. I set about to learn how to develop those films and make prints. A close family friend, Ruben Goldberg, who was a photographer at the University of Pennsylvania Anthropology Museum, showed me how to develop and print them.

I call myself a camera whisperer in that I use my camera to communicate with others. It is as if the camera speaks before I do. As a child I was shy, not given to talking too much. In fact, I still am a reticent person. My camera provided me with my voice to communicate with the world and enabled me to enter into conversations with people with whom I might not otherwise have had spoken.

Growing up in the early fifties in Philadelphia, a city that was very much marked by segregation’s practices, I became aware at an early age of the differences between cultures and classes. At that time it was Blacks, Jews and Whites. Our house was one block from the Black community. There were between us invisible lines that denoted where each group belonged.

These things curious to me as a child became points of departure for topics I was to explore with my photography later in life. For example, Face-to-Face: Encounters between Jews and Blacks and City/2. The former explored race relations, the later interactions between people in public places.

At age seventeen, a part time job in a flower shop permitted me to earn enough money to buy an Asahi Pentax camera (cost then $150). Soon thereafter I took off hitchhiking to Mexico. My idea was to learn Spanish and make photographs. Some of the photos made then made it on to the pages of the popular photo magazines of the day like Modern and Popular Photography.

From the series "Echele Ganas" © Laurence Salzmann

From the series "Echele Ganas" © Laurence Salzmann

Photography has allowed me to express my feelings about life and the world around me. History and the study of cultures has informed my photographic vision. I seek to know about places before I photograph them. Serendipity has aided often in my quest to make a memorable photograph. Like my photograph of the hearse in the snow that came to define my Last Jews of Raduati series.

After fifty years the magic that I felt when I developed my first roll of 620 film is still there. The thrill of making a photograph and then printing it out even if just on a digital printer still fascinates me as much as the first time I saw my print appear in the developer bath.

f: And how about your study and work in anthropology? How has that informed your photographic practice?

LS: This is a good question and leaves much to think about.

Before photography, a prior interest of mine as a child was stamp collecting. I was a part of a group of kids I remember in junior high like at age 11-13 who traded stamps. Together we went to stamp stores and stamp meets where we met fellow collectors and learned about water marks and perforations. Now-a-days people don't even send letters or give much thought to the stamp on one if they ever send one.

Stamps brought me in contact with the larger world and excited my fancy about far away places that I was able to visit through the pictures and photos found on stamps. I also came to have five or six pen pals in countries far and wide with whom I traded stamps and learned a little bit about their country through the stories they told or the events depicted on the stamps we traded.

Stamps gave me a world perspective and an interest in people, history and geography.

From the series "Echele Ganas" © Laurence Salzmann

Interest in far away places was also encouraged in my home in that my father had begun his medical practice in Germany prior to World War II and I had an aunt from Bucuresti, Romania, a city I was later to live in.

I played soccer on a football team, half of whose members were DP’s (Displaced Persons) from the Ukraine. My best friend was a German kid whose Dad had worked in the Soviet Union. A high school friend from the soccer team was a person I hitchhiked to Cuba with in 1960. We were to visit a high school friend who had invited us to come down and see the Cuban Revolution. Can you really see a revolution?

To that time dates my interest in Latino cultures and other cultures in general.

On Saturdays I would hang out with one of my dad's very best friends, Goldberg that I mentioned above, watching him develop pictures in the darkroom there.

When I got my first serious camera, a Kodak Pony 135 fixed lens 35mm camera made out of Bakelite, he showed me how to make available light pictures in the museum's galleries. That was my first introduction to anthropology and photography. He was a great available light photographer back in the day when ASA speeds must have been just 50. So my first pictures were in an anthropology museum. How that informs my photography will take a few more paragraphs.

From the series "Tlaxcalan Sketches" © Laurence Salzmann

From the series "Tlaxcalan Sketches" © Laurence Salzmann

Soon I had by own darkroom in a basement of my parent's house. My dad, always helpful, got a friend to give him an old Federal enlarger and various other odds and ends of photo equipment and soon I was printing photos of my own. My work then was pretty mundane and nothing much to write home about except for one picture I took of a kid in high school picking his nose that was a big hit with everyone except the kid picking his nose.

At age 15 or 16 I graduated to my first really good camera, that Asahi Pentax K [Ed: mentioned above] that was to stay with me for the next 22 years.

In my travels that began at 16 and continued through age 22 or so that camera was always with me. I used to buy Tri-X in 100 foot reels and spool it down and load my own canisters to keep costs down.

I hitchhiked all across the US and once all the way down to Costa Rica. I worked as a work-a-way on foreign flag ships and succeeded in getting Merchant Marine papers (something difficult to do), which permitted me further travel until I arrived at age 19 or so in Belgium. That was the beginning of more travel and picture taking and the learning of German and French. I attended courses here and there and eventually when I returned to the US two years later, I completed my college study as both a language and history major.

From the series "Tlaxcalan Sketches" © Laurence Salzmann

Photography was something I did not feel a need to study as I thought I already knew how to make photographs. Of course it would have helped had I studied it, but I was a wise guy and said to myself, "why study something you already know?" In an effort not to fight in a stupid war and kill people that I had not yet met for no good reason (turns out later I was right), I joined the Peace Corps and was sent to train for a program that would take us to Chile during the time of Frei [Eduardo Nicanor Frei Montalva, former President of Chile], just prior to the US planned coup d'etat that overthrew [Salvador] Allende.

In my training group there was an anthropologist from Columbia Univeristy. Soon I was deemed unfit for Peace Corps service because I had a beard and was considered too pro-Castro. That is how things were in our country in the 1960s. My anthropologist friend recommended I contact his professor and try to get work through him in New York City.

I got hired by a project he was involved with in studying the residents of people living in Single Room Occupancy Hotels. That, and my experience with living in a poor barrio of Juárez, Mexico during my Peace Corps training where I began my first serious project, "Luis's Family," helped make me decide that having a bit more formal training in anthropology would be a good idea. I sat in on some classes given by Margaret Meade who was famous for using photography in her researches in the South Pacific. I started teaching anthropologists how to use photography in their field research and eventually obtained a Master's degree in visual anthropology from Temple University that led to many other connections for me.

From the series "Tlaxcalan Sketches" © Laurence Salzmann

So formal study of the anthropology discipline brought me to have a better understanding of the concepts of what one would call today embedding oneself in a community foreign from one's own. In anthropology, it's sometimes called community participation/observation. A crucial part of course is speaking or understanding the language of the groups being studied and my earlier youthful wanderlust years had left me speaking a smattering of various languages and prepared me to some extent for learning additional ones or at least pretending to understand them even if I did not quite speak them.

I felt that both sociology and anthropology offered a way to understand diverse cultures and deepen my photographic interpretations of ways of life other than my own. I came late to video, but filmmaking was a part of my career from early on.

I shot my first film at age 19 with a professor of English at Temple University. I told him I was an experienced cameraman so he hired me without pay to be the DP [director of photography] on a film he was making based on the poem by the famous American poet Wallace Stevens. We borrowed somebody's camera - a 16mm Bolex - and went into production. It might have been good or bad but the only time we showed that film it all fell apart at every splice because I had used the wrong tape to splice the pieces together. Over time, I honed my skills as an editor and as a cameraman and got to work on other films. Some of them are even still worth looking at including one entitled, "Eddie" that was about an Irish-American named Eddie O'Brian living in a Single Room Occupancy Hotel. It won one of the American Film Institute's first funding awards. And 45 years later it still has a punch to it.

From the series "Luis's Family" © Laurence Salzmann

That was in a way an anthropological film in that it is about a kind of subculture of people living in poverty in New York City in Single Room Occupancy Hotels. The homeless street people of today were once housed in such hotels.

One thing leads to the next as the great Jewish storyteller Isaac Bashevis Singer would like to say. And the next thing after a stint as a maker of documentaries about drug abuse for Encyclopedia Britannica was getting hired by Timothy Asch to be the editor of his Yanomamo films. And thereafter being hired by Alan Lomax to be editor of his films, trying to prove his theories of universal dance. All of those projects are well-known and documented either for better or worse depending on whose commentaries you are reading.

I should add that while anthropology may help to broaden my photographic documentations, I am at heart a committed photographer interested in making an image that has resonance and works.

So this just begins to open up or provide an answer to your questions.

f: How did you develop your connection to Mexico and tell us about your early photographic work there.

LS:  It started at age five when my parents drove to Mexico and bought us all Mariachi customs, complete with sombrero and a serape. That is the beginning of the story. Amazing how things from childhood affect you later on in life. They had also bought a painting of a Mexican peasant in somber colors, à la Diego Rivera, which for many years graced our family's living room. I still have it.

At age 17, I set out on a cold February morning to hitchhike from Philadelphia to Mexico. I had dropped out of high school in the second part of my senior year, and wanted to improve the little Spanish I had learned in Cuba during the previous summer.

From the series "Luis's Family" © Laurence Salzmann

In 1966, I was invited to train for the Peace Corps at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. My training included an "in-country experience" in Mexico. Our group was taken to the city of Juárez where each of us was assigned to live with a family. Mine was a family of adobe brick makers. They lived in a barrio humilde (shantytown), outside of Juárez near the Rio Grande River. They were migrants from the state of Zacatecas. I started to photograph them. After I was "de-selected" from the Peace Corps I decided to return to Juárez to make a photographic essay about the family with whom I had stayed during my Peace Corps training.

I photographed the men making adobe bricks in primitive kilns fired by old tires; Juana, the mother, making tortillas cooked over an open fire on a comal made of clay; the children working with their father, Alvino; and Luis, the man who owned the brick yard where they toiled. I titled the finished work "Luis's Family." My photographs were dark and somber, and revealed, in the clarity of black and white images, the impoverished conditions of the family.

On my return to the United States, I continued to work on these images. The photography curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art selected a group of my photographs for inclusion in their photography collection. I made up a dummy book and showed it to Diane Arbus in New York, hoping she might suggest a publisher for them. No one was interested. In retrospect, I now understand: the photographs were too sad.

Inspired by Oscar Lewis' book Children of Sanchez, I attended a summer training program for anthropology students conducted by the University of Pittsburgh in 1969, in the state of Tlaxcala, Mexico. I was sent to the village of Santa Isabel. I set out to create a photographic ethnography of Santa Isabel. At that time, Santa Isabel's life was still very traditional. Villagers tended their milpas, small plots of land on which they raised corn, squash and beans, and built their houses with adobe bricks with red tile roofs; they made pulque, a milk-colored, alcoholic beverage from the fermented sap of the maguey plants that dotted the landscape, and which also served as fences between each family's plot of land. That summer we witnessed the Apollo moon landing on TV sets that had been newly introduced to the village – a striking contrast to the culture of the villagers, many of whom were still walking around barefoot and wearing clothing made from homespun flax. My photographs showed the traditional way of life – that was soon to change, like women washing clothes in the local stream…

At a Visual Anthropology conference in 1971, I met Ayse Gürsan, a Turkish anthropologist who was planning a trip to Mexico to study the peasant market systems of Puebla, Tlaxcala and the Oaxaca Valleys. I volunteered to be her photographer and translator. This cooperative work led to our marriage, and a long history of collaboration on other projects.

These early experiences in Mexico were the beginning of my photographic career, rooted in humanistic themes that I hoped would create paths of understanding between cultures.

From the series "Luis's Family" © Laurence Salzmann

f: I find it intriguing that you've gone back to create work in Mexico four decades later, work that's recently been published as the book Echele Ganas. Do you see these two projects - the first of your career and your most recent book - as comparable? What do they show us about the consistencies and changes in your photography over your career?

LS: Your question is a good one. Anything can be compared with something else and one could compare "Luis's Family" to "Echele Ganas" or for that matter my other Mexican work, "Tlaxcalan Sketches" from 1971.

Stylistically the essays are quite different from each other. "Luis's Family" was shot in 35mm black and white and is very somber in outlook. "Echele Ganas" I shot with 6x6 medium format color negative film and it is happier and less full of angst.

"Luis's Family" is a very intimate portrait of a very small group of people, ten at most. "Echele Ganas" is a portrait of a larger community and includes their celebrations and provides a wider overview of their way of life and its meaning for them. With both sets of photographs there is a closeness to the people photographed.

"Echele Ganas" was worked on over a longer period of time. I was also familiar with many of the family members [of the subjects] that had moved to Philadelphia, helping them solve problems that arose from being here.

"Luis’s Family" photographs use an overcast light whereas "Echele Ganas photographs" were made for the most in bright sunshine.

From the series "Luis's Family" © Laurence Salzmann

The geography of Juárez, where "Luis’s Family" is set, was bleak and flat. There are no maguey plants to delineate the landscape

Tonalpa and the other villages where I photographed for "Echele Ganas" have a greener landscape, surrounded by mountains and some still standing forests.

"Luis's Family" is more about a culture of poverty with little hope. Sort of like the dust bowl photographs of the thirties.

"Echele Ganas" tells more of a story, about its people who leave at a very early age to work in a place where, if they are lucky, they can return in five years time with enough money to build a house and start a family. Some also lose the families they had if they stay too long. [The subjects in] "Luis’s Family" in Juárez had very little hope of escaping their impoverished life.

"Luis's Family" is a photo essay by a youthful photographer just starting out. Where one hopes one's photography can still change the world. As we grow older we learn otherwise.

"Echele Ganas" is a more mature work with more details. In "Echele Ganas" I was less concerned with the poverty of the people and more concerned with the values that held them together as a community. "Echele Ganas" has a multifaceted approach, and makes use of a video narrative to allow the subjects themselves to tell their own story.

From the series "Luis's Family" © Laurence Salzmann

"Luis's Family" relied on a poetic essay by a writer named Thomas Paine who I had invited to work on the project with me. Tom, a former US Marine, fancied himself part inheritor of Tom Paine’s legacy (a distant relative he claimed) and [also that of] James Agee. We were both perhaps influenced by Walker Evans and Agee's book entitled,  Let us Now Praise Famous Men. What young person starting out wouldn't be? Together we drove a drive-a-way car from Philadelphia to El Paso and then walked over the border to Juárez, Mexico. We slept on the floor together with the family we were documenting.

They lived next to the Rio Grande. I believe at that time Mexicans were allowed to cross the border for the day without any visas. And many did to work at jobs in El Paso.

Consistencies:
Concern for other ways of life and presenting a visual documentation of them.

Changes:
Visual outlook more developed as a result of 40 years more experience working as a documentary photographer. To use an appropriate cliché, "everything is not black and white." [There are] many shades of gray in between.

I feel that sometimes a format used in photographing dictates or gives a certain look to one's photography. [In this case], a 35mm Leica format with wide-angle 28mm lens versus a medium format 6x6 camera.

f: Anything else you'd like to add Laurence?

LS: Is this before they blindfold me?

From the series "Luis's Family" © Laurence Salzmann

Reading Shortlist 8.14.12

© Mark Steinmetz, from the series "South Central"

The Reading Shortlist is an occasional post with an eclectic listing of recommended readings and links. A recommendation does not necessarily suggest an agreement with the contents of the post. For previous shortlists, please visit the site links page.

Blake Andrews, Q&A with Mark Steinmetz. Great interview with a photographer as eloquent as his images. "Maybe back in the day I would have selected photographs for their complexity or difficulty; now it often seems to me the simplest ones are the strongest."

Claire O'Neill, NPR Picture Show, Found In a Closet: A Photo Trove of '60s Icons. Another photographic re-discovery: celebrity portrait photographer Jack Robinson.

David Alan Harvey, Burn Magazine, A Conversation with James Estrin, New York Times Lens Blog. A wide-ranging conversation including the challenges and opportunities for young photographers and the history of the photography business.

Greg Stevens, The Kernel, Fighting Futurism: Why "Progress" Is a Myth. I came across this article amidst the back-and-forth's between writers on different sites about the idea of progress in photography last month. A little big-word-heavy, but readable and interesting.

The Guardian, Is the Age of the Critic Over? Criticism and class in contemporary society.

Jonah Lehrer, The New Yorker, Brainstorming Doesn't Really Work. As best as I know, he didn't make this article up.

Peter Levi, The Huffington Post, Open and Closed Photographs. A short look at a quote from Paolo Pellegrin on the idea of photographs being closed- or open-ended and how that affects the viewing experience of them.

Unless You Will, Issue 11. This is an old issue of the Australia-based online magazine, but I keep going back to it. Unless You Will editor Heidi Romano co-curated this issue with Andrés Marroquín Winkelmann. In particular, work from Amy Elkins, Alexander Binder, Anne Schwalbe, and Robin Friend stand out.

The Visual Experience. Writing to keep an eye on ("Thinking" under the "Articles" tag).

Walker Evans in His Own Words. A short video that includes Walker Evans talking about his own work and footage of him shooting in the field.

Book Discussion Group Recap: Walker Evans

© Walker Evans, Houses and Billboards in Atlanta, 1936

I am joining Flak Photo and creator Andy Adams to host an online community conversation on the Flak Photo Books Facebook page focused on essays from Gerry Badger’s recently published book of essays, "The Pleasures of Good Photographs."

This public discussion provides a structured setting for expanding our understanding of the essays by reading collectively. All are welcome to join in! We began with the essay, "Literate, Authoritative, Transcendent: Walker Evans's American Photographs" and the conversation continues this week of Monday, May 21st with the essay "A Certain Sensibility: John Gossage, the Photographer as Auteur." (page 87) A full reading schedule can be found here.

I am following up on these community conversations with posts here on fototazo that will recap a selection of the ideas we discuss.  These follow-up posts will necessarily be an abbreviated selection given the length and quality of the conversation in the community discussion threads. In many cases, what arose from the conversation were questions and ideas to continue to explore, and not necessarily conclusions or consensus. My goal with these follow-up posts is to pull out threads from the weekly discussion that can be applied beyond the individual essays to inform our general understanding of the medium itself.

____________________________________

TERMS
We found quickly that a core issue for a group conversation is the importance of defining terms. As the conversation evolved, the differentiation between the words "truth," "reality," and "accurate" became crucial for understanding one another.

We generally came to an understanding of "reality" meaning the world in which we live physically, "accurate" to mean the fidelity of a representation to something in reality, and "truth" to mean...well, I don't think we ever came close to an agreement. See below.



TRUTH
The healthiest argument of the week focused around the perennial issue of truth in photography.

The issue of how to use the term was an issue from the start. Was truth a measure of how "accurate" an image is? Was truth a problematic term leading us all into the winter woods at dusk with no matches? Is there a single truth? Many truths?

Defining "truth" started to pull us into larger conversations of philosophy and semantics. It was suggested that we define the term. It was suggested we stop talking about the term.

Contributor Pedro Safadi addressed the passage by Badger that sparked the debate. In this passage, Badger wrote that Evans believed, "The photographer must impose nothing upon direct and undiluted experience. He must discover, divine, and reveal his truth rather than construct it." (page 31)

Safadi replied, "I think it is very telling that the words 'his truth' rather that 'a truth' or 'the truth' are used in that sentence. Walker Evans may have preached for the capturing of reality free of manipulation as a tenet of documentary photography, but he has been accused of rearranging objects in some of the photographs he made. Are those manipulated photographs factually truthful? They are not if the threshold is transcribing a place and time as it existed in that precise temporal chunk that the camera has sliced away. Are they pieces of the photographer’s subjective personal truth that he / she wanted to reveal to us, where that truth transcends the actual and factual physical reality? I believe they are."

These comments represented one side of the conversation that argued for a separation of "accurate" (as defined above) from "truth" and a vision not just of a single truth, but different kinds of truth. One could be "accurate." Another could be a sense of "emotional truth" or a sense of rightness about an image.

A second camp pushed for a stronger single bond between "true" and "accurate," in part because this helps to emphasize photography's unique ability to present a relatively unmediated view of reality, a bond which lead Badger to write, "For me, the documentary, or the 'documentary mode,' remains not only the core of the medium, but the source of its greatest potency." (7)

The fundamental and eternal debate on truth in photography was not fully resolved this week by our discussion group.



CONSTRUCTION
Connected with the conversation on truth arose the related, but separate issue of construction in photography. It started from the same passage in the essay cited above, in which Badger writes that Evans believed a photographer must discover, divine, and reveal his truth rather than construct it.

As part of this conversation, contributor John Armstrong wrote, "Constructedness is the original sin of photography" and Bonita Springs, Florida-based photographer Dennis Church that "I believe all images are constructed, some more consciously than others."  Others felt accepting "construction" as a part of all images without establishing some guidelines would risk equating documentary work and photographers like Gregory Crewsdon.

Like in the conversation on truth, we discussed the idea of construction being on a spectrum that avoids the duality of an image being "constructed"or "not constructed." Instead, images would be seen through degrees of construction with complete construction of a scene on one side of the spectrum and construction by unavoidable decisions on lens choice, perspective, and cropping on the other side.



TRUTH AND TIME
The point was made that the question of "truth" in photography may rely on time; that the truth-value of an image may actually shift according to public perceptions of photography over time. This suggests any photographic truth is not an absolute, but something that may be redefined in relation to changes in the history and understanding of the medium.

As an example, the work of Alexander Gardner, accepted as "photojournalism" in the 1860s and therefore likely seen in its day as mostly truthful in terms of depicting an event that actually happened, today would be labeled as less "truthful" (in these terms) because the contemporary code of photojournalism does not provide for moving objects and bodies in an image. The image itself would therefore be less "true" today than in the past due to shifting perceptions of what is acceptable in photojournalism.



BELIEF IN PHOTOGRAPHY
One of the bigger points of disagreement during the week was over the state of belief we have in photography in contemporary life. This seems an issue that truly divides current thinking on photography.

LA-based photographer Justin Fiset wrote a strong defense of the "we believe" position:

     Where you get it wrong is claiming that photography has no franchise on reality, it does.
     Here’s why. Even though we’re all real smart people who are hip to post-modernism and
     photoshop we still believe photographs. During the course of a day we take photographic
     veracity for granted at least a hundred times. Even a heavily photoshoped image on your
      Facebook feed that made you do a double-take, you subconsciously afforded the photo your
     trust before you realized you had been tricked (I’m trying to think of an example to use here
     but I’ve got nothing, sorry). That trust wouldn’t have been given to an illustration...

London-based photographer Pete Massingham took the opposing view:

     In response to Justins' excellent comments I feel obliged to respond and to some extent beg
     to differ. I am not altogether convinced that people (artists/practitioners) today do actually
     believe in a photographic veracity. One of the exquisite but illusional qualities of the photographic
     process has been its ability to seduce us into a false sense of relationship to reality, when in fact
     what we are perceiving is as much a representation of reality as the painted or drawn image. The
     fact we believe in it does not make it any more real as a document of reality. I am reminded of
     a well known dialogue that occurred between Picasso and a newspaper or art critic. The
     interviewer was trying to pin Picasso down on the issue of realism in his distorted figurative
     paintings, and offered I believe an image of his wife from his wallet as evidence of an image
     which was more realistic. Picasso's response was something along the lines of 'So your wife is
     only three inches tall and two wide is she?'

Badger weighs in with Massingham. He writes in the introduction: "Photography's value as art has never been so high, yet in these mediawise and Photoshopping times its value as documentary has never been so questioned." (8)



WHERE MEANING IS CREATED
Educator and photographer Angela Kelly made the point towards the end of the week that, "A readerly approach while taking into account the artist's intention suggests the larger meaning of a work of art lies somewhere between the artists intention and the audience or even critic who encounters it within a different context."

Massingham followed by writing "What happens once the work is thrown open to public scrutiny (either in book form or as an exhibition) is both fascinating and complex. Arguments are developed, and theories espoused, all of which inform our understanding of the works of art in question. However, there are ocasions when this process of examination is presented as the primary concern of the work - the original context and intent relegated to some dark redundent corner of history. To accept that contemporary theory and observation can be interwoven at will with historical works - without contradiction or complication, is troublesome to say the least."

This conversation about where meaning is created in art, and the potential dangers of disregarding original intent, is one I hope we continue to investigate during the coming weeks in our essay discussions.



AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHERS
Badger writes that Evans is the "most American of artists." (28) This raised the question of who we would say defines "American photography."

Texas-based photographer Pugilist Press included Robert Adams, William Christenberry, William Eggleston. Wright Morris, Ed Ruscha, and - in the way they approach the American Image in a similar way - Cindy Sherman and Philip-Lorca DiCorcia on his list.

Safadi added, "Those who, for me, define American photography during the period that spans the beginning of the 20th century all the way through to the start of the 2nd World War include the greats such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston as well as [Alfred] Stieglitz, [Lewis] Hine, [Paul] Strand."

The question of which photographers define "American photography" remains another question to continue pursuing during the coming weeks.



THE OBJECT IN AMERICAN ART
Badger's argument for Evans being the most American of artists rests largely on a passage in the essay in which he addresses the object in the history of American art.

One contributor summarized it well: "'The integrity of the object' – I think the crux of Badger’s argument lies within that statement. If, for Badger, the fundamental essence of American art (and what actually defines it) is indeed the integrity of the object being depicted then certainly the medium of photography provides that integrity as part and parcel of its true nature. And that is why, in his point of view, the American sensibility lends itself to the photographic medium as the mode of expression that allows for the transparent means of capturing/depicting the object in its entirety (faults and all)."

And Pugilist Press added: "I will say that Americans have a special relationship with the object that while not that singular in experience seems to be singular in cultural expression. It has something to do with the potential for splendor in the vernacular and a penchant for sensuality. It's Elvis' Blue Suede Shoes, American Graffiti's cars, those baubles from The Man in The High Castle, Ignatz' brick."

Both make good points. While also keeping in mind that America in popular thought is connected with object creation, consumption, and possession, however, a hanging question from this conversation is whether the object has a particular place in American High Art, and not just in popular cultural expression.

Badger seems to say so, couching his argument for Evans as a quintessential American artist by drawing Evans' connection to the history of the object in US painting. But what about Dutch still lives? And Cézanne? And Morandi? The incredibly detailed objects in a Thai Ramayana mural? Is the connection between the object in High Art and America really unique? Could we equally argue that landscapes are uniquely "American" with US ties to the Western frontier, the New World, and Manifest Destiny?



NARRATIVE
We also considered the narrative potential of photography this week. To what degree can photography tell stories? What are the limits of narrative in photography?

We talked - in the shadow of a previous conversation on truth and construction in a single image - about the subjective control of the message of a photobook through sequencing images to create narrative. Leeds, UK-based photographer and educator Philip Welding raised an interesting point: "Badger compares [American Photographs] to an epic poem, film or novel; all very much fictional constructs. It seems more comfortable to recognize this artifice within book form than when discussing the photography itself."

It's a good question - are we more comfortable with accepting the artifice of sequencing, editing, constructed narrative, and presentation decisions than we are with the idea that a photograph itself is a constructed fiction?

To push a step more: does questioning the "truth" of an image itself threaten our understanding of reality and ourselves in a way that causes many of us to want to defend it, while we understand and accept the fiction of a narrative sequence, edit, and presentation more comfortably?



READING TEXTS
One last point. A text can be read in two ways - first, to understand the author's intent, to push to understand what the writer says, and to engage the author on their terms.

The second, equally important and perhaps more important for photography practitioners and non-academics, is reading a text to find what we need for our own practice and thought processes, regardless of a more literal analysis of what the author intended.

Bill Evans, the jazz pianist, once said that he was a Buddhist, but didn't want to learn anything more about Buddhism. What he understood Buddhism to be, he said, was exactly what he needed it to be. He was afraid that if he learned more about it, he might discover that it wasn’t actually what he understood and wanted it to be.

This spirit is important to maintain in our reading, especially of more academically-oriented texts. Rather than pinpointing an understanding of the author’s argument on a particular part of a photographer’s career, frequently letting a sentence or idea resonate so that it leads us to an understanding we can apply to our own work gives us more from our reading, even if it’s not exactly accurate....true...real...wait...uh oh...the original intent of the text itself.

Flak Photo Discussion on Gerry Badger's "The Pleasures of Good Photographs" Begins Today

© Walker Evans, Houses and Billboards in Atlanta, 1936

I am joining Flak Photo and creator Andy Adams to host an online community conversation focused on essays from Gerry Badger’s recently published "The Pleasures of Good Photographs" on the Flak Photo Books Facebook page.

I will also be making weekly posts here on fototazo exploring the main points of the conversation.

All are welcome to join in the discussion! We are beginning today with Badger's essay, "Literate, Authoritative, Transcendent: Walker Evans's American Photographs."

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

© Alec Soth, from Dog Days Bogotá

In the latest in a recent series of articles on Thomas Hoepker’s September 11th image, Joerg Colberg of Conscientious published a well-written piece entitled “How we give photographs meaning.” In the post he opens up several threads of potential conversation: the importance of including context when reading an image, all photographs as fictions with no inherent meaning, the ethics of photojournalism, meanings as constructs, etc.

Given I agree with Colberg’s main points (and to dwell on the few second-tier points I have questions about seems nitpicky), I’m going to build on the conversation his piece continues by pulling out one particular thread of his post. This will also be a way to slow the conversation down and explore in depth one of those potential conversations his essay opens.

Colberg writes (my italics):

               “The meaning of a photograph is a construct that involves a group of people operating
               against a specific background (news, art, …), subject to the group’s personal, cultural and
               political biases. I think what we should be talking about is not how truthful photographs
               are, but how truthful we expect them to be, given the background they’re operating in.”

This quote raises a slippery question: how do we know what background we are operating against? Just where are those lines between fine art photography, photojournalism, and documentary photography?

It’s not immediately clear how we should approach establishing those lines in a photographic world in which someone like Alec Soth, to choose an example, can call himself a documentary photographer while simultaneously being a member of the premier photojournalism agency in the world and having a retrospective at a major contemporary art museum. Is it a question of where we see the photograph? If the same image is in both a gallery and a newspaper, should we say we’re operating against an art background in one situation and against a photojournalistic one in the other? Or is it a question of subject matter so that a picture made to describe a war, for example, is inherently photojournalism? But then what to make of Richard Mosse’s Infra? Is a photograph what the photographer says it is? Joel-Peter Witkin surely couldn’t claim his work is documentary. Then is it the observer that decides? What if you and I differ in opinion - who’s right?

© Richard Mosse, from Infra

To make things more complicated, the question is also a temporal one – the lines between genres are alive, constantly moving and shifting to reflect cultural changes, historical events, prevailing intellectual winds, and the photographic marketplace.

To look at these questions, I’m going to dust off and cannibalize a paper for this post that I wrote a few years ago that explores the history of the relationship between these three genres. More historical than polemical, it examines how the 1970s in particular played an important role in forming the contemporary photographic landscape of more elastic definitions that we live in today.

I’ll boil the paper down as much as possible to get rid of what’s not to the point and polish it up a bit, but I don’t think I can get rid of the fundamental academic feel of having written it in a university setting. I solemnly swear to you, however, that I won’t use the words “hegemony,” “epistemological,” or “syllogism.”

This post will be divided into at least two due to length. Today will give the background for what happens in the '70s which will be the subject of the second (and any subsequent) posts.

______________________________________ 

A number of factors combined during the 1970s to accelerate the movement between the photographic genres of documentary work, photojournalism, and fine art photography that have opened into today’s era of more fluid relationships. During this decade the rise of television and the concurrent decline in the magazine industry, the rise of galleries dedicated to showing fine art photography, the museum’s firm establishment of the photographic print as a unique and collectable object and the resulting development of the market for photographic prints, the development of artist's books, the evolution of an economic infrastructure that helped sustain photographers as artists, and the questioning of the ability of photography to document or record events factually all contributed to the rise of the new era.

The boundaries between documentary photography, photojournalism, and fine art photography have never been absolute and have increasingly overlapped during the course of photographic history. The '70s built on existing trends in photography. Photographic historian Mary Warner Marien writes about the '70s milieu in a book called Photography: A Cultural History:

               The presence of documentary and photojournalistic photographs in museums and
               galleries was not new…Nevertheless, in the past, image-makers, audiences, curators, and
               scholars had considered art photography, documentary photography, and photojournalism
               as having their own separate lines of development and different social agendas. (Marien 410)

© Eugène Atget

To pull out just a few examples, Eugène Atget consciously cropped the developing modern Paris around the historical construct he intended to photograph in his Vieux Paris images and he photographed in correlation to the interests of his various clients, revealing a strong subjectivity to work he labeled “documents.”

Dorothea Lange and other documentary photographers of the Farm Security Administration made their way into art exhibitions and Walker Evans exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938. Evans defined his work as art despite often being considered a prototypical documentarian by asserting that his work does not have a utilitarian use such as a police crime scene photograph. He also noted the artifice involved in “documentary work.” FSA photographers used stylistic elements such as sharp focus, even lighting, and a frontal composition to code their images as factual and to indicate that they should be read as unbiased. “Documentary?” famously questioned Evans. “That’s a very sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear. . .The term should be documentary style.” (Blake Stimson, The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation, 210) Evans, in short, was aware of the common urge to view documentary images as mimetic, but was cognizant of the bias of the photographer’s perspective.

The Magnum photography agency in 1947 challenged the notion of what constituted photojournalism. Founded as a photographic cooperative, members of Magnum retain the rights to their photographs as well as the authority to conceive and execute their own projects. Although their work still needs to find a market, by removing the responsibility to answer to assignments designed by newspaper and magazine editors, the freelance photojournalists of Magnum defined the term "photojournalism" for themselves, broadening the scope of the genre to include longer projects done in essay form, which becomes close to indistinguishable from the type of work done by Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. In turn, Riis and particularly Hine can be listed as either documentarians or photojournalists depending on the article or book.

Original front cover, uncredited image

Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958) marked a new era in documentary work in which individual and psychological issues replaced the historical, ideological, and political issues of earlier photographs (such as those of the FSA) and formed a style of intimacy instead of an attempted detachment. Working under a Guggenheim Foundation grant, and not under the guidelines of a newspaper editor or a government program, Frank documented 1950s American society of all strata during his cross-country road trips, photographing flags, politicians, cars, and racial dynamics. At the same time, however, he concerned himself with how the exterior world reflected his interior world. “I’m always doing the same images,” he has stated, “I’m always looking outside, trying to look inside.” (Stimson 105) The angry, bemused looks that manifest the photographer’s intrusion in The Americans might be said, according to Stimson, to be the singular moment of the document becoming art, though the document could be considered art since Atget. (Stimson 211)

From the 1950s to the 1970s, work that allowed more space for the personal and contingent in photojournalism became accepted and known as "new journalism." (Mary Panzer, Things as They Are, 27) Although more commonly associated with print journalism, the term “new journalism” became connected to photographers who injected a personal, first-person perspective into their reporting. The Vietnam War, for example, became the center of a perceived link between photojournalism and personal politics as photographers such as Phillip Jones Griffiths abandoned their supposed objectivity and took a stance in opposition of the war.

Lastly, new social documentary photographers emerged from the mix of anti-Vietnam War activism and conceptual art ideas of the era to add another dynamic to the idea of the photograph as a document. The interests of this informal group, which included Allan Sekula, Martha Rosler, and Fred Lonidier among others, included techniques not traditionally associated with documentary work, such as collage, to comment on social oppression without making "victim photographs" that evoked too much overt sympathy or voyeurism. Rosler says, "We wanted to be documentarians in a way that documentarians hadn't been…We wanted to use obviously theatrical or dramatized sequences or performance elements together with more traditional documentary strategies, to use text, irony, absurdity, mixed forms of all types." (Marien 429)

© Martha Rosler, Balloons

We can see that the terms “photojournalism” and “documentary photography” showed significant flexibility before the 1970s. “Photojournalism” went from encompassing the construction of events by the photographer - such as Alexander Gardner's openly rearranged Civil War battle scenes - to considering itself as objective reportage, including politics as part of its stance, and accepting first-person perspective in the form of "new journalism." “Documentary photography” went from being considered the recording of actual documents to being a passionate crusading appeal intended to provoke its audience to action with the work of Riis and Hine, a passive and objective lens with the FSA, an attempt to present psychological reality, sociological assessment, the recording of other art forms for documentation such as earthworks, and even the physical collage of images.

As Lili Corbus Bezner writes in her book Photography and Politics in America: From the New Deal into the Cold War, “documentary photography frequently intrudes into contradictory categorization; it exists uneasily, therefore, within the supposedly distinct domains of journalistic, artistic, landscape, fashion, and advertising photography.” (Bezner 1) Similarly, Beaumont Newhall, the first director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote in a later edition of The History of Photography, “Since World War II the [documentary] movement has lost impetus in the organizational sense. Its tenets have been absorbed and have become essential to the fabric of photojournalism.” (Bezner 12)

To be continued Friday

The Image: Kevin Thrasher, "North Adams, MA"

© Kevin Thrasher, North Adams, MA, 2009

When I saw snow on the hillside that had not yet melted in the morning sunlight, I knew there was probably something interesting there. Looking down from that hill, across the road and onto the people's homes, I imagined someone being raised in that town, living their life in one of those houses and then being laid to rest near their home. For me, it illustrates a life cycle. At the time I was making photographs in graveyards. I was trying to come up with some great truths about life and death. In the end, this is the only good photo I made in a graveyard. Walker Evans made a wonderful photograph in a graveyard, I know his photograph was in my head when I made my photograph.

- Kevin Thrasher