Where's your pleasure?

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From Phil's description of his bag picture in his Small Things thread:

From La Jetée, that I watched again last night along with the DVDs 'Extras' (it's only 27 minutes long and I love watching it: thanks Phil!):

Thinking about that last quote this morning, my first feeling was that it was all wrong in relation to our present discussion: it's backward! The present is what I need to be intensely 'in,' when photographing, feeling for its roots and connections: I need to be more not less sensitive to its every permutation. But then I noticed that it was Constable's present, or, with Phil's bag picture, Phil's present that I was 'hearing.' But then ... [ ... give me a few more minutes of thinking ... thinking, thinking ... ] ... I notice: what I in fact have is not Constable or Phil; what I have is "one oblique bluish cloud" and "two "thin red clouds" and a plastic bag. What 'present' do I get? "First the present and all its supports must be stripped away."

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I'm thinking that the difference between my first kind of photographing and my second kind, as described in the OP, is (to oversimplify) the difference between 'taking' and 'making.' The first, for me, taking, is all about pleasure. It is, in its crudest form, like shopping (and that's not a put-down: I like to shop as my Amazon bills will testify). In the second kind, pleasure is more or less incidental, and may even be a nuisance and a distraction. What needs to be in or stay in the picture may be what is often less, often much less 'attractive.'

when looking back

The problem I have with that is that it covers almost everything. I expect cancer survivors have great pleasure in looking back at their struggle to overcome cancer, simply because they have survived.

For me most of my pictures are taken spontaneously in a more documentary tradition.

I would suggest (I can't know) that you are responding to or shooting "at" something very different from eye candy. I won't venture what it is that you have in mind, but I think you do have something in mind during shooting.

constructing of something new

But I don't think you ever get the raw material for such looking back unless you push it, push it hard in a constant feedback loop of shooting-looking (at the pictures later)-shooting-looking (at the pictures later). I think that only happens if you work at it, iterate, iterate, iterate, until each layer of change grows into your seeing — so you can push it further. And, at least for me, that pushing is hard. If I'm finding shooting easy, I know I'm not going anywhere.

Here's a trivial negative example of what I mean. Two days ago, I had about half an hour to shoot around with the little SL. I was delighted to come upon the following bit of exploded aged chrome on an old car:

I found those little figures and the holes to be very interesting and I thought to myself, "You should slow down, think about this, and really work this picture." And then I thought to myself, "No. I'm out here to have fun, and that's what I'm going to do." I took this snap and went home and had supper.

I simply didn't feel like doing the work — and failing and doing it again, and so on (once I get into thinking about something, dammit, it's going to be worked). I just didn't feel like it ... because it's not a pleasure for me. I pick my fights these days, and the fights I pick are composites, not singles.

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motivation

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I saw, and greatly enjoyed, photographing this epic battle between a mud dauber wasp and a fat spider, yesterday afternoon.

Two things I think I can say about the above:

1. You didn't really look at them.
   
2. I know that you wouldn't really look at them (we've all seen bug fights a thousand times in media of all kinds *yawn*).
   
3. If you'd been there, you would have photographed them, too.
   

So is this kind of photography just harmless, fun, fluff? On reflection, this morning, I don't think so at all (to my surprise). And not just because this kind of exercise is a great way to sharpen one's eye. I think, even though we don't really "look at" these kinds of pictures, from them, we accumulate ideas about what other people are like.

When I see bug fights in public media, where I don't know (or notice) who the photographer is, they're just forgettable bug fights. But when I see, for example, in No Words, day after day, the accumulated "sights" from named photographers (us!), I build up a feeling of what other people (we!) are like. I couldn't tell you the details of any single image I've skimmed past in No Words, but I could tell you at length, my built-up sense of what many of the "regulars" who post there are like. I don't think that's trivial "fluff." I think it's valuable, possibly very valuable to each of us.

By comparison to my second kind of photography from the OP, I don't think that photographic art gives me any sense of what the photographer is like. I do often get a very strong sense of what their mind is working on, but I don't feel that I'm seeing that person's everyday world. Even in something personal like The Americans, I don't "feel" Robert Frank as the everyday person that I know from his biography (found elsewhere than his photos). Martin Parr's food photographs, which are really fun, get the closest to making the everyday person (Parr) be evident in his art. You're going to suggest Nan Goldin, but I don't get Nan from her work: I get something much more than Nan that more or less obliterates her in the process.

Art is after something in excess, or at least something different; something more elusive. It's a response to a different motive (that Phil has been working at throughout this thread). This morning, I'm thinking about the motivation for me shooting a spider-wasp fight that I know nobody will ever look at. Even me, beyond this morning ...

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Phil, I know what you're getting at, but if I can play devil's advocate, why don't your requirements describe advertising/commercial photography?

How about these two (just off the top of my head):

A good picture needs to present me with some kind of dilemma and/or give the feeling of shared solitude ( << I'll let you ponder that oxymoron for yourself, but I like it ... and I stole it from a book I'm reading).

When you feel or experience it as something worthy being shared.

That makes it sound as if it's all up to you.

I think, rather, that "shared solitude" is about being a link in a chain. It's up to you to 'hold,' to not fail, but the chain is not (just) yours. Without you it does fail, but so does it fail without all before and after.

Mostly when people are thinking about pleasure and photography it's about the recording of pleasurable moments, like birthdays, times spent with friends and family, etc...As much as I would love to have these kind of photographs I never take them, probably because I also hate to pose for such kind of pictures (a friend recently told me that I should do so anyway, who cares if it's posing, make a game of it). So I don't participate in having this kind of lived photographic history (except for all the family pictures when I was a child) the way people and non-photographers do (but the pictures I end up taking and making have very much to do with my personal history in one way or another). Especially nowadays such a photographic record has often more to do with putting up a facade of pleasure to the outside world than being about an expression of something authentic and truthful (which is the thing that gives me pleasure).

I was at a funeral today, and there were a number of big boards set up with just the kinds of pictures you're talking about and vastly missing the point of. I've long thought that these family snapshots, complete with predictable gestures and all, are among the most important and authentic pictures made. Today proved it.

There I was, meeting a friend's family (a friend whose mom of 89 just died) for the first time, watching his 4 brothers and sisters, all in their sixties, looking back at their lives and the lives of their parents and children in pictures, sharing them in such a heartfelt way with newly-found friends and acquaintances. It wasn't about the damn expressions and gestures. It wasn't about the "outside world," where you seem to have situated yourself. It was about the people and the moments and the family and the span of a lifetime.

These pictures are the truth. The gestures and facial expressions are a ritual, a tradition into which people envelop themselves. Think of those familiar poses as yoga positions.

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" ... [and] to many a one his own childhood would appear out of half-oblivion, and one would pass from tale to tale far into the summer night, but also far into the mutually true, rich and alive." — Rainer Maria Rilke

Photography is not fundamental to remembering

And no one said it is.

You just don't get it. You will, sometime around the time you stop looking down your nose at the "inauthentic" others who do things you don't care to do. Maybe.

looking down your nose

... and you are looking down your nose at Phil for looking down his nose.

And I am looking down my nose at you for looking down your nose at Phil for looking down his nose.

And readers of this thread are looking down their nose at me for looking down my nose at you for looking down your nose at Phil for looking down his nose.

Can we please stop the nose-down-looking and stick to the topic at hand?

Thanks!

... and you are looking down your nose at Phil for looking down his nose.

 

And I am looking down my nose at you for looking down your nose at Phil for looking down his nose.

False equivalences all.

stick to the topic at hand?

Remind me, is the topic at hand "pleasure in photography" or the quote from Rilke about childhood and truth or is it the musings about Chris Marker's film as it inspired 12 Monkeys? Don't answer. I know what's off topic is simply whatever you deem is off topic and what's on topic is all the hash you want to throw into a thread. But, out of respect for you, I'll stop posting here. Adieu.

Remind me, is the topic at hand

Okay, rather than trying to be "fun," I'll say what I meant bluntly:

Please stop the personal attacks. Thanks.

Adieu.

OK. I lied. Gotta finish this one up.

I didn't say anything about finding others inauthentic.

Yes you did. And it's memorialized right here in this thread:

Phil: "Especially nowadays such a photographic record has often more to do with putting up a facade of pleasure to the outside world than being about an expression of something authentic and truthful (which is the thing that gives me pleasure)."

just because someone thinks differently than you do on matters doesn't mean they don't get it

I know that. I run into people who think differently from me all the time and know that doesn't mean they don't get it. But when you mistake what is happening with a family looking at photos at a funeral for "nostalgia," it's got nothing to do with your disagreeing with me. It's proof that you don't get it. By reducing it to nostalgia, you show you don't understand (i.e., don't get) the fullness of the experience we were having.

Am I still allowed to have my own opinion on it too?

YES! Just as I am allowed my own opinion on the statements you make here. If I think you don't get something, I'm allowed to say it just as you are allowed to give all the opinions you'd like to give about people who take the kinds of pictures you're not interested in.

I have to admit. Like Phil, I too feel awkward posing for group photos, but I appreciate the sharing and connecting values such exercises involve. I used to think, unposed candid photos have more information about the person(s) than when they are deliberately posing in front of the camera, but my experiences over the years have changed my view. I think, theres a lot to be learned about people from the pose (or facade) they are putting on. I was asked to take pictures at a wedding ceremony in India recently, where I had the chance to interact with a lot of groups and different people. I noticed how people connected with each other, and with me by virtue of posing for a photo. I enjoyed the exercise very much (I thought it might be tiring) and even didn't mind posing myself when asked to join a group :). That was a real pleasure. Here is a photo of the cousins with the bride.

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That's a good picture, Supriyo. I really like the cut-left eyes of the lady one from the right. She adds just the right touch of spice. Also the fabric mix is just gorgeous.

Long ago and far away, I did sports photography for a University SID (Sports Information Dept.). That included many group/team photos, and also many "mug" shots of individual athletes. I will agree with Supriyo that it was much more interesting than I expected, and it was very good training for me (as was doing every kind of sport: you really learn by the challenges each sport presents).

Changing the subject (don't leave this one: I just want to put this out there):

This is the astronaut Scott Kelly today on NPR's Morning Edition talking about "fun" in space:

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"Fred, I've been to plenty of funerals and seen plenty of family slideshows at funerals. I do get it. Am I still allowed to have my own opinion on it too" Phil.

Interesting" question..

'Where do you find pleasure in making your pictures? Does any of your work make you as miserable as my second kind does' Julie.

Sort of got lost in the Julie mind: like being a bloke version of Alice in that wonderland place. So, I found the easy bit to answer in the Julie/ Alice post.

Love taking pictures it make me look thrice at the world and create a third eye in my mind.

All those non photographers/artists only see a Disney version of the world. A make belief.

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In Sam Stephenson's lovely recent book Gene Smith's Sink: A Wide-Angle View, he gives the following account of a conversation he had with a man, Tamas Janda, whom W. Eugene Smith had mentored — took him in, gave him cameras and instruction — at a time when Smith was himself, not in very good shape:

If you're familiar with Smith's biography, I think you will agree that he had a pretty awful life. Yet it seems to me that in those micro moments when he was in the act of photographing, he was happy, he had "fun." Not the macro moments of photography, the getting ready, the finding a structure, a reason, and then a what-to-do-with it that comes after, but in those micro "inside the act" moments of being in the eye, I think he was ... having fun.

I think this is true of many of other photographers that I can think of who had comparably awful lives. In the middle of the train wreck that is their personal real life, they have or had that "eye inside" that "had to be filled" and within that time of "filling," I think they had fun. Joy, even.

Or at least that's what I get from looking at their work.

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photographs and looking at photographs tend to replace memories more than that they authentically recall them

This sentiment reminds me of a similar statement by photographer Sally Mann in the preface of her excellent book Hold Still, a Memoir with Photographs:

Photography would seem to preserve our past and make it invulnerable to the distortions of repeated memorial superimpositions, but I think that is a fallacy: photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories.

When I read this in Sally's book I wrote it down and gave it a specific mention in a blog post I wrote recommending her book. Phil's comment reminded me of it. When I put this together with the opening challenge put forth by Julie as to "what's your pleasure", I guess I would say that my pleasure with photography is "creating memories". I stress that "creating" is different than "preserving". The thoughts and imaginings that arise when I look at a photograph I took 5 years ago may have little to do with the reality that existed 5 years ago, but these thoughts and imaginings are memories none-the-less.

My short review of Sally's book, with several other excellent quotes that merit their own discussions here on the philosophy forum can be found here, Hold Still review.

The thoughts and imaginings that arise when I look at a photograph I took 5 years ago may have little to do with the reality that existed 5 years ago, but these thoughts and imaginings are memories none-the-less.

I'm curious why you think of them as memories while at the same time saying they're not?

Photos create space, they express ideas, they show things. They often do involve memories, real or imagined (or corrupted), but they often are about many other things besides memory.

I don't think Sally Mann is right. I don't think photos "corrupt" the past any more than memories do. It's not like the past is some constant that can be either perfect or imperfect. The past is as fluid to us as the present, in that our perspective on it is always changing. It's not as though it's supposed to remain rigid and either our photos or our memories somehow do damage to it.

I see photography, my own and others, as often pointing a way forward as pointing a way back.

I'm curious why you think of them as memories while at the same time saying they're not?

What I was trying to describe is that my memories are whatever my mind conjures or dredges up today about some past event. This can be and most likely is very different from the reality that existed when the event took place.

In any case, I agree with what you say:

The past is as fluid to us as the present, in that our perspective on it is always changing

and to me this seems to imply that you do agree with Sally's sentiment. If I may be so bold as to speculate on Sally Mann's opinions, I would think she'd agree with what you wrote (except perhaps for the sentence "I don't think Sally Mann is right" :))