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"These are simply documents I make."

 

What I hear from people about photo-documents is:

 

"They're just documents."

"Documents are boring."

 

Do you find documents boring? Do you find Atget's pictures boring? Why?

 

"The document was a fundamentally practical picture that lay at the bottom of visual culture as a base line, a point of departure, an objective pole. The document lived out its time quietly in the basement, many floors below the storied academic hierarchy, well below genre, well below still life, way below landscape. It was not considered worthy of discussion and it never generated any kind of theory.

 

[
line break added
] Yet in the late nineteenth century the document was fast becoming something more than a preparatory step for buildings, paintings, and ornamental details. Whether drawn or photographed, the document was playing an increasingly important role in the elaboration of scientific and historical proof. It became a standard way of expressing knowledge; it became a means to knowledge; and it put together pictorial forms of knowledge, though they were not yet taken up as aesthetic forms and exploited for their own sake. That would come later."

 

"... When
called his pictures documents he was explaining that they circulated in the closed channels of painters' cartons, decorators' folios, and libraries' files, where individual pictures counted for little and the quality of the file was measured by its scope. Unlike Matisse and Baudelaire, he saw a dignity in this kind of picture. This puts Atget's ideas against the grain of so many others that it bears stopping to consider how to put this technicality together with our preconceptions about culture."

 

"... each of these archives hoped to establish its own special relation to a kind of knowledge, and sometimes to more than one kind. Each exercised its own power over its own strand of knowledge." —
Molly Nesbit writing in
Atget's Seven Albums
(1992)

 

I hear people say: "Documents are boring." Or if they don't say it, they show it by their actions; what they look at, what they shoot, what they buy, what they talk about.

 

Documents are knowledge.

Is knowledge boring? If so, what makes a picture not boring?

 

Do you enjoy looking at photo-documents (tell the truth)? What kind of photo would you rather be looking at? Why?

 

Do you see any "dignity in this kind of picture" (documents)? Do you agree that "Each exercised its own power over its own strand of knowledge"? But they're still boring (tell the truth)?

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Here is some more from Molly Nesbit for those who don't find the knowledge from documents to be boring:

 

"The assertion ["
These are simply documents I make
"] is unambiguous, reiterated by Atget himself, recorded by those who knew him, and read out of the pictures by those who did not. Atget's claim for his pictures can be taken at face value: the photographs are documents, in the first and the last instance. The assumption does ask for more evidence, although it would do well to state it plainly now: fundamentally Atget was content with his cultural lot.

 

[
line break added
] Atget's assertion that his pictures were documents was hardly naïve; he knew of the existence of other possibilities, like pictorialist photography, but kept his distance from them, just as he had shrugged off the kind of highbrow cultural dissent practiced by the Surrealists. Those who knew Atget well have all spoken about this tenaciousness, his tendency to dispute, his strong opinions, his temper. His concierge, who was in addition one of the best friends of Atget's mistress, could not overemphasize the point.

 

[line break added
] In 1928, Calmettes, his best and oldest friend, put it succinctly, "In art, in hygiene, he was absolute. He had his own ideas on everything and he imposed them with an unspeakable violence. He applied this intransigence of taste, of vision, of processes, to photography and from it came marvels." It is therefore important to understand why Atget persistently kept to his documents and kept his pictures moving along a specific layer of the cultural zone, not the public exhibition of Salon painters and galleries but the field of the archive and the printed page. This is not the familiar Parnassian ground of art history, but then neither is the document."

 

[ ... ]

 

"While Atget was working, the work of art and the document were like night is to day and not to be confused.

 

"The document's relation to knowledge was neither natural nor trivial. It held knowledge that in turn would be used to produce more knowledge, usually in a more advanced state. So a document of Vieux Paris would inform an antiquarian's account of a seventeenth-century political event; a document of a lampshade salesman might inform a genre painting meant for Salon exhibition. And yet the document was not the source of power; it was not representing its own noble order; rather it spoke from the position of the peasant who harvested for the lord, or the worker who produced for the capitalist."

 

[ ... ]

 

"Knowledge merged and converged in Atget's photographs in a way that reveals much about the relations between knowledges and much about the nuts and bolts of modern visual culture. However, and this is extremely important, Atget's pictures were not completely identified with these knowledges. Most of the time his photographs were breathing down the
outsides
of one kind of
connaissance
or another, their forms addressing the knowledge yet to come, their relation to power unsteady, ambivalent. And that was hardly the end of it."

 

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Before getting into the nitty-gritty documents about 'Documents' here's a little bit of snarky museum gossip about the New Documents MoMA show from Arthur Lubow's biography of Arbus:

"Arbus's photographs dominated the notices of the exhibition. 'The press was all about Diane, it was as if Garry and Lee didn't exist,' Papageorge commented. He thought Avedon [Diane's friend] was manipulating the journalists behind the scenes. Certainly Avedon was a master of public relations, but even without intermediary maneuvers, Arbus's work tugged at spectators as the work of the other two did not.
Newsweek
devoted two-thirds of its review to Arbus; the writer credited her with "the sharp, crystal-clear, generous vision of a poet" and quoted Avedon's remark, "She has taken photography away from the sneaks, the grabbers, the generation created by
Life
,
Look
and
Popular Photography
and returned it to the artist." (As 'sneaks' and 'grabbers' were unflattering names for street photographers such as Winogrand and Friedlander, this comment — coming from a fashion and portrait photographer — was heavily loaded.)"

 

*snicker*

 

Now, still in Lubow's book, here is how he describes Szarkowski's take on 'New Documents':

"Instead of wanting to improve the world [as the WPA documentary photographers had], the new generation sought to understand it. Or so Szarkowski argued. The three photographers he selected for the exhibition — Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus — worked in very different idioms, but each had reshaped the form to suit a personal agenda.

 

[
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]
What made their photographs, in Szarkowski's view, 'like absolutely the first breath of spring air coming through the smoggy city' was the depleted state of documentary photography, which 'had gotten so leaden, tired, boring, dutiful, automatic and Pavlovian' that it was 'dreary' and 'distasteful to look at,' as uninspired and uninspiring as a campaign speech.
These three photographers were using the documentary form 'to explore their own experience and their own life and not to persuade somebody else what to do or what to work for,' Szarkowski said." [emphasis added]

 

(I think Friedlander himself is also the most influential among the three).

 

Szarkowski thought Winogrand was the more influential. Again, from Lubow:

 

"Winogrand — whom Szarkowski would later judge to be 'the central photographer of his generation' — typically tried to compress the maximum of chaos within a frame without collapsing into incoherence. Friedlander mediated his images with cool, cerebral irony. Arbus infused individual portraits with her psychological preoccupations, erotic longings and mythic fancies."

 

Szarkowski does agree with Phil that Friedlander was the one most influenced by Atget (whereas Arbus < Sander; Winogrand < Frank).

 

But how can any of these photographers be reconciled with Atget, who, after all, worked very deliberately to make documents for clients?

 

I'll use Winogrand to address that issue in my next post.

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How does one reconcile the New Documents with Atget's 'documents'?

 

First some descriptions of what the New Documents generation, and Garry Winogrand in particular,were trying to do or not do. All of this is from John Szarkowski, writing in Winogrand: Figments of the Real World (1988):

 

"It would not be a gross exaggeration to say that, in the eyes of the young turks, a photograph that was sharp all over, that was fully exposed in the shadows, and that was not visibly grainy was insincere. To add artificial light to the scene was worse, it was simple fraud.

 

"In rational terms this was nonsense, but in artistic terms the question was not so simple. To the new photographers the old pictures seemed planned, designed, conceived, understood in advance: they were little more than illustrations, in fact less, since they claimed to be something else — the exploration of real life."

 

Atget did illustration. He made pictures with the specific intent of selling them to artists, set designers, the building industry, amateurs of vieux Paris, and publishers. His work was planned, conceived, understood in advance, at least in the sense of knowing what he wanted and what it was intended for. This puts him on the wrong side of the New Documents attitude.

 

Back to Szarkowski:

 

"The term 'snapshot aesthetic' was coined to give a name to the open-ended character of [Winogrand's style of] imagery, so different from the familiar ideal of good pictorial design, with its taut assemblage of interlocking shapes. Winogrand thought the label idiotic, and pointed out correctly that the prototypical snapshot was — at least in intention — rigidly conceptual, even totemic. At a deeper level, however, there was perhaps some justice in the term, for the snapshooter and Winogrand agreed that the subject was everything. The difference between them was that the snapshooter thought he knew what the subject was in advance, and for Winogrand, photography was the process of discovering it."

 

Once again, we find Atget on the wrong side of this 'new' document. He surely 'knew what the subject was in advance.' He was not, in any sense, a snapshooter.

 

Back to Szarkowski on Winogrand:

"The work of his immediate predecessors now seems in comparison almost simple, and has receded into the security of history, where problems seem clear and solutions inevitable. Winogrand';s work in contrast remains difficult and problematic. It is possible that his vision of photography's potential finally led him to problems too complexly difficult to allow rational hope of success. Photography is based on the faith that there is a relation between aspect and meaning, but how does one describe the meaning of chaos without submitting to it? Younger photographers may retreat a little from such Faustian ambition, in exchange for the reassurance of a greater measure of control. Even so, Winogrand will have made their problem more difficult, for his work has demonstrated that photography can give visible and permanent shape to experience so complex, unpredictable, subtle, and evanescent that one would have thought it uncommunicable."

 

Ahhhh ... now I think I see how Winogrand backing up, bumps into Atget, who, also backing up, meets him from the opposite direction.

 

Atget to follow, next.

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Atget was not a snapshooter. From Molly Nesbit's book:

 

"Atget worked sometimes on commission, but generally on spec. Typically he addressed sectors of clients. These sectors defined themselves for Atget. The painters most often referred Atget to other painters; the members of the building industry referred almost exclusively to each other; with the set designers and the Vieux Paris amateurs the same clubhouse attitudes held. These would have encouraged Atget to think along the lines of the various professions and to map out his documents according to their functions. As he did his business, Atget was led to think in categories. These were the categories of practical vision.

 

"All this meant that Atget produced documents in kind. The variations in his market caused some fluctuations in the way Atget ran his business but in essence the work was standardized, the documents were regular. He was always working for the same kinds of clients, with the same requirements for documents."

 

Sounds like the opposite of Winogrand or Friedlander so far. But when working for artist and set designers, he would do 'backgrounds.' Continuing with Molly Nesbit:

"For an artist they read literally as scenes waiting for action. The fact that Walter Benjamin, reviewing the first Atget monograph in 1931, did not see Atghet's pictures as
études
but instead felt them to be vacant like scenes of a crime (or by some translations, action) reinforces the point. The photographs in their capacity as documents asked for a narrative, dramatic action, a relation to a larger whole; they anticipated a look that would pirate; they also expected a look that would supplement. Each kind of document however worked off a different profile of possibilities; the nature of the supplement varied with the genre. This much can be said of all documents for artists: they anticipated a look that would see ahead to fully brushed and well-populated landscapes, characters, narrative action, and punch lines, the horizon of expectations in the artists' practical vision. Space in those documents left room for a look; more than that, it signified absence."

 

Now we're seeing Atget knowing in advance that he will not know in advance. I think he's leapfrogged over Winogrand to be one hop ahead of him in the not-knowing department.

 

Even when not purposely leaving scenes open and ambiguous, Atget made room for the unexpected because of his diverse clientele:

 

"For Atget brought his documents to the different professions, each with its own sense of how to use its eyes, each with its own register of form and its own procedures for making form tell. All of the professions took the document into the very early stages of their work. Atget therefore always found himself at the dawn of the knowledges, before they had actually broken forth into discourse, while they were still cogitating, recollecting, pulling thought together, preparing a weave, and he operated in this half-light between the knowledges, in a space which was by and large outside them all."

 

" ... Just because it fell into the space of regular work did not mean that it came unnuanced and clear; that idea of transparency in ordinary practical communication is a cliché invented in order to give all the nuance to literature and art. Documents too could be guarded, opaque, and as patterned as sonnets."

 

"... The space of Atget's operations was composed of a crisscross of outer spaces, at the beginning of others' labor, before the archive, in and out of legally defined culture, on the gray ground of the marketplace, wherever that was. The outside was not a pure blackness, not an abstraction to be conjured up when all other images failed. The outside had its own kinds of solidity, materials and potential. Atget understood its subtleties and benefits well. From the outside he would deal with the
connaissance
s. His documents would subordinate culture to knowledge; others could do with this knowledge what they liked."

 

Those last three paragraphs could as well have been describing Winogrand or Friedlander. From different directions, I think I recognize influence.

 

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Questions for you, Phil. In a brief introduction to the book that accompanied a 1968 Brassaï show at MoMA, Szarkowski wrote this:

 

"The photography of continental Europe during the past thirty-five years has been polarized by the work of two dominant figures; one is Henri Cartier-Bresson, the other Brassaï. Between them they seem almost to have pre-empted the possibilities of the art in their time and place. Cartier-Bresson has been the classicist, imbued with the French love of measure, valuing balance and clarity and the sophistication of the great tradition — as though he too had decided to do Poussin over again, this time with photography.

 

"Brassaï, the Parisian from Transylvania, seems in contrast an angel of darkness. His sensibility dates from an earlier age, and delights in the primal, the fantastic, the ambiguous, even the bizarre. Yet the most distinguishing characteristic of Brassaï's work is its profound poise and naturalness, its sense of easy permanence. Looking at his pictures, one is not aware of the act of photographing; it is rather as though the subject, through some agency of its own, reproduced itself."

 

Szarkowski makes no mention of Atget. How would you say Cartier-Bresson and Brassaï fit into this discussion of 'documents,' and how would each relate to Atget, if at all?

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An odd bit of trivia:

 

In the Szarkowski book on Winogrand, he talks about Winogrand's first wife, repeatedly spelling her name 'Adrienne Lubow.' The recent biography of Diane Arbus is written by 'Arthur Lubow.' But the Wikipedia page on Winogrand spells his first wife's name 'Adrienne Lubeau.' Okay, okay, who cares, but I'd like to know if Arthur happened to be in the family, just because.

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Dresser Drawer, Ed's Place, 1947 by Wright Morris

 

"If, for example, one should decide to open, and then to photograph, the top drawer of an uncle's chest of drawers one has not set oneself a very difficult technical problem. The light should be right; a soft, enveloping light, without hard shadows, will be best for describing clearly the strange miscellany of stuff in the drawer. A way must be found to support the camera rigidly in the right place. The right place is the place from which the camera best sees the contents of the drawer.

 

[
line break added
] Once the camera is in the right place, the exposure should be close to correct; after that, the darkroom parts of the process should be done well and with sensibility, so that the viewer of the print is persuaded momentarily to suspend disbelief and think that he is looking at the contents of an old man's drawer, the odds and ends of an old man's life, rather than at a piece of paper covered with a pattern of molecular silver.

 

[
line break added
] If the result of all this is a failure, one can return to the motif and may, with luck, find that the subject is still similar to what it was, and try again. None of the component parts of this process is very difficult, and, in fact, a person of average intelligence and sensibility should be able to learn in six months time to execute the whole sequence of procedures successfully most of the time.

 

[
line break added
] One might way that it should be no more difficult to make a good photograph than to write a good sentence. This is not to say that the student will produce photographs of such elegant technical finish and precision of expression as those of Paul Strand, say, or Ansel Adams, or Harry Callahan, but rather that their pictures are likely to be made as well as their thought deserves. This brings us to the more difficult and the more important part of the problem.

 

"It would be unfair to say that the important part is having the right uncle. ... " —
John Szarkowski writing in
Wright Morris: Origin of a Species
(1992)

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getting colder

 

"Morris had praised Walker Evans, and it seems clear that his own photography owes a debt to the older man ... "

 

"Morris' photographs relate more clearly to those of Evans than to any other earlier body of work ... "

 

"The differences between the two men are not so easy to describe. In 1967, I arranged to have prints made from a selection of Morris negatives made a quarter-century earlier, one set for Morris and one for the Museum of Modern Art. When the prints were finished, I shared the pleasure of them with Edward Steichen, who was visiting the Museum. After looking at the prints we tried briefly to puzzle out why Morris' photographs — so similar if described in words to many of Evans' — were in the flesh so different in feeling. Our effort to analyze the difference did not get far. 'Evans feels cooler,' I said. 'Colder,' Steichen said." —
John Szarkowski

 

If you look at Wright Morris's work, I think you'll agree with their assessment. I think that Evans and the New Documents work moves away from warmth. But I think Atget's work is never cool.

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character

 

Here is Szarkowski working on the similarities in Morris and Evans work:

"... both men are most at home with architecture and found still life, and with what one might call the anthropological landscape. In all of these areas each is attracted to the kind of beauty that is commonly called character, meaning (in Horatio Greenough's terms) the record of function, a record that closely parallels the record of loss."

 

Here is Wright Morris, himself, talking about character:

 

"The word beauty is not a Protestant thing. The Protestant word for that is character. Character is supposed to cover what I feel about a cane-seated chair, and the faded bib, with the ironed-in stitches, of an old man's overalls. Character is the word, but it doesn't cover the ground. ... It doesn't cover what is moving about it, that is, I say these things are beautiful, but I do so with the understanding that mighty few people anywhere will follow what I mean. Perhaps all I'm saying is that character can be a form of passion, and that some things, these things, have that kind of character. That kind of passion has made them holy things."

 

****************************************************

 

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The Memory Cabinet of Mrs. K. …. 1960

by

[ ... ]

 

Middle Drawer

………
Hammer and picture wire; flowered pajamas; cross-stitched

dresser scarf; kimono, missing belt; velveteen sandals from

Panama, huts and palm trees carved into the heel; a squirt

gun; detachable collar with lip print; postcard from the

Poconos; pack of cards; a trivet made of popsicle sticks.

 

Bottom Drawer

………
Souvenir pillow from Watkins Glen; presser foot; zipper

foot; flywheel belt; an ink bottle, rubber stopper askew;

inside
a bevy of charred wings rising, over a black, but

moonlit pond
; extension cord, box of bobbins, belt for

a blue kimono; diploma; certificate of perfect attendance.

 

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One might way that it should be no more difficult to make a good photograph than to write a good sentence.

Indeed, if it only wasn't for the presence of typos. But what is the photographic equivalent of a typo. An exposure dial nudged slightly to the left, or to the right. Or maybe a 2 degree tilt of the horizon in an upward, or downward, direction. Do such errors really diminish the photo, even if left unchecked, to the same degree that typos diminish a sentence, any sentence or only those that are supposed to educate?

 

E&OE :-)

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...............

expression

 

My feeling is that they might just as easily have looked at Morris's work as 'warmer' and 'hot' leaving Evans to be the standard of somehow 'just right' instead of the other way around (where Evans is the one noted as being off).

 

To my eye, I can understand 'cooler' when looking at Evans work, but that's just an immediate, on-arrival description. I think Evans' work is more challenging (therefore 'cooler'); it's harder, and intentionally so. It's like a big fat nut with its shell still on. You have to suspect there is meat inside, and work to get it. There's just as much there, but it's given to you whole, not shelled.

 

While the large format negative and print adds an unmistakable clarity and depth to the surface of the world in terms of its strict documentation when compared to the small format (which can be more expressive), the large format contact print precisely because of its potential clarity as a photographic document can intimate to more than what it shows.

 

I'm still thinking about that, but I will say now that I believe large format difference has at least as much to do with how it forces the photographer to behave as it does with what the camera does or doesn't do with/to it's negative.

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If you agree with this from Molly Nesbit:

"... Atget was not interested in any and all differences, differences between individuals for example were not important to him, although they could easily have been. Atget's idea of putting together sixty views of ordinary, private apartments, identified by a few, unspecified facts and without any human presence, was altogether unusual in a public context. Normally portraits like these, of unpeopled rooms, were seen in private places, in family albums alongside other views of the home and family life, each of which had special personal significance."

 

"... The individual was not allowed out of the album [< Atget's project/collection]. Cécile Sorel, already a public figure famous for her Célimène, her Marie-Antoinette nose, and her extravagance, was there [in his album] as a rich and famous actress, not as herself. The album took what might in another context be considered a family photograph and presented it as a document where nostalgia and delusion were excluded by the technical sign. The individual was submitted to knowledge. There were no exceptions."

 

... if you agree with that — "the individual was submitted to knowledge," — then you might see Wright Morris and, oddly, Lee Friedlander as falling into a fellowship. But, interestingly (to me), Arbus and Winogrand turn out to be sort of anti-Atget's in the sense that they show things that refuse "the knowledge." They show the individual(s) that refuse to submit to knowledge. They show the cracks, the failures, the exceptions. They do it by the same means, via the document, only this time turning Atget's process inside-out. They both see the same border; one approaches it from the side of knowledge, the other from the side of the failure of knowledge.

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Returning to Evans vs Wright Morris, here is Alan Trachtenberg writing about their differences:

 

"Sincerely respectful of the older man's pictures, undoubtedly educated by Evans's unerring eye for the revealing scene or detail, Morris took pains to clarify how their motives and purposes differed. Silent about the great variety, complexity, and many-sidedness of Evans's work, the wit and ironic interplay of word, picture, and thing within many of his pictures, Morris understandably stressed differences in motive in order better to differentiate his own accomplishment. The key difference in his mind was how each of them felt about his subject-matter.

 

[li
ne break added
] In an essay Evans published in 1969, a series of pithy commentaries on selected photographs, he said of Morris's
(1947) that the picture had 'imprinted' in it 'some of the shoddiness and all the heartbreak of the century ... a perfect example of photography's habit, when guided by a master, of picking up searing little spots of realism and of underlining them, quietly, proportionately. Morris's detailed comment is a waft of rather pleasant melancholia.' In 1975, the year Evans died, Morris demurred from this judgment. He wrote that Evans saw the photographed chair as 'expressive of the cruelty of rural environment, its stark shearing off to what is minimally human ... . But to my eye and nature the poignancy of that deprivation is moving and appealing. I
love
the chair.' "

 

"... Often [Morris] used the term
icon
to describe the near-magical effect on him of such objects as that chair. 'Through human contact' they achieve 'expressive form'; they possess a 'concealed life.' Evans, in this view, sought signs of human activity, of history and culture, while Morris was after a different kind of aura, evidence of 'the dominance of the past in all aspects of the present, the palpable sense of time as a presence.' The past for Evans, Morris would say, was less a sign of time, the inscrutable dimension of human life, than of the accumulated residue of which history is made. 'I wanted evidence of man in the artifacts that reveal his passing,' Morris wrote, the emphasis falling on
passing
, a key word in his lexicon of assumptions, part of the process of loss and gain.

 

"... Evans took the picture [
] as a brilliantly transcribed historical fact, a record of a culture, its 'shoddiness' and 'heartbreak.' It is not just that Morris loved what he thought Evans sneered at. Loving the chair, the worn, patterned, linoleum floor, the plainly carpentered door and jamb and hardware-store knob and latch, Morris took the picture not as a document of culture, but as the occasion to hear a voice, someone's voice."

 

"... A final thing to say is that like the world of Walker Evans, Morris's is a realm of human artifacts, handmade objects jostling the store-bought, the mass-produced: the world's body, redeemed. His pictures make the commonplace monumental, raising the inconspicuous to conspicuous grandeur: stark, gaunt, world-weary, and world-awakening."

 

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This next may seem a little OT, but I think it's relevant to the idea that photographs are 'documents.' Documents of what?

 

This is Ralph Lieberman writing about Wright Morris's use of both photo and text (Morris was a writer and poet before, during and after he was a photographer):

 

"... in
Photographs and Words
[by Morris], he recalled a drive through northern Mississippi in 1940, on which he 'passed a field where a harness-patched plow horse, white as Moby Dick, stood luminous in a piece of over-grazed pasture, his heavy head bowed. I should have stopped to photograph it. That I did not is why I have forever borne it so vividly in mind.' The idea that by not photographing something he remembered it better was a notion Morris continually reconsidered, and ultimately he came to the conclusion that 'the camera is the first obstruction between us and experience. I think this is both subtle and inevitable. When you become lens-oriented, the object itself is secondary and you wait to see later what it is you've done.'

 

"In
Solo
, the second of his autobiographical volumes, Morris describes crossing to Europe on a freighter in the late summer of 1933:

 

Near the mid-Atlantic, we had some bad weather, with seas so high they spilled into the gangway. I wasn't
really
sick, but the thought of food made me stand in the gangway, the spray in my face, breathing in deeply until I felt better. What I wanted to know, and had a chance to find out, was the difference between a real storm at sea and reading about a storm in [Joseph] Conrad. When I came to know the difference, however, the sea had calmed and it was Conrad's storm that I remembered."

 

" ... 'First we make those images to see clearly: then we see clearly only what we have made. In my own case, over forty years of writing what I have observed and imagined has replaced and overlapped what I once remembered. The fictions have become the facts of my life.' "

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  • 2 weeks later...

Having read through the entire thread a couple of times, I find myself confused by the original proposal, and by most of the responses.

Atget's pictures (thank you, Julie) are interesting and important to all of us, as a peek through the keyhole of history.

To refer to them as "documents" today may be accurate, as it is to refer to the "Declaration of Independence" can be considered by some factions in the United States.

These pictures are scenes that Atget wanted to capture, of a society and world that he saw changing, and that would soon be unrecognisable.

These were definitely NOT snapshots. The people who we see, now long gone, were well aware that they would be seen by others, and were appropriately prepared.

But these were ordinary people, in ordinary settings. These pictures, and all pictures made in the same spirit, must be cherished and preserved and viewed.

 

Snapshots? Not really, at least not most of them.

Documents? I wouldn't use that term, but as a window into the ( admittedly antiquated and no longer acceptable ) norms of society, possibly;

similar use of the term, referred above, is used for "documents" which are equally

antiquated and no longer acceptable.

 

My thoughts, yours will probably differ.

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My thoughts, yours will probably differ.

I hope so! That's what leads to a good discussion.

 

Danny, in the OP I was asking if a viewer (you!) finds 'documents'* boring. If you were leafing through a history of photography, or an anthology of photography, and an Atget page flipped by, would you stop? Would you want to look at it before the other pictures, if not first, then at least tenth? Or would you figure that glimpse was enough?

 

Pick out an Atget picture that you like looking at and tell me why you like looking at it (not why it's good; why you like want to look at it). Why is it not-boring?

 

[*please note that 'documents' does not mean documentary. Atget used it to separate his work from art. He's, in effect, trying to say, "My pictures are [something] but they are not [surreal] art [like yours]" >> he was addressing Man Ray.]

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Here is Walter Benjamin trying to figure out what a 'document' is by using a list:

 

I. The artist makes a work.
..............................................................................................
The primitive expresses himself in documents.

II. The artwork is only a document.
................................................................................
No document is as such a work of art.

III. The artwork is a masterpieces.
.................................................................................
The document serves to instruct.

IV. On artworks, artists learn their craft.
.........................................................................
Before documents, a public is educated.

V. Artworks are remote from each other in their perfection.
....... .....................................
All documents communicate through their subject matter.

VI. In the artwork content and form are one: meaning.
..................................................
In documents, the subject matter is dominant.

VII. Meaning is the outcome of experience.
...................................................................
Subject matter is the outcome of dreams.

VIII. In the artwork, subject matter is a ballast jettisoned during contemplation.
...........
The more one loses oneself in a document, the denser the subject matter grows.

IX. In the artwork the formal law is central.
....................................................................
Forms are merely dispersed in documents.

X. The artwork is synthetic: an energy center.
...............................................................
The fertility of the document demands: analysis.

XI. The impact of an artwork increases with viewing.
....................................................
A document overpowers only through surprise.

XII. The virility of works lies in assault.
..........................................................................
The document's innocence gives it cover.

XIII. The artist sets out to conquer meanings.
...............................................................
The primitive man barricades himself behind subject matter.

 

Molly Nesbit immediately disagrees [re Atget] with the word "primitive": "... the relations between form and knowledge at the level of the document, though primary, were hardly primitive. They depended upon intermediaries, contingencies, that could be blocked or turned, that might or might not let knowledge in." But I think Benjamin's list is interesting anyway, if only in stimulating me to think about why I don't agree with (parts of) it.

...........

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  • 1 month later...

..........

 

"Atget had his own view of the sun. Not Man Ray's, not Zola's. His lines would fall on nonaesthetic ground. His prospects were not theirs.

 

"It is more than ironic that Atget's place in history was secured by the very same Surrealist circles he had not so delicately skirted in 1926 and that his work is generally seen now in light of modern art. ... Whether it is possible to recover Atget's optic of difference and all the standards and distinctions by which his work can be judged is of course debatable, but the basic lines, the differences, can be deduced."

 

[ ... ]

 

"They [Desnos, Man Ray and their friends] admired his pictures for their qualitative cultural difference; they could tell that those photographs stemmed from another, immensely sensitive, stubbornly popular culture, alien and at the same time half-familiar, strange and desirable,
pensé
and
impensé
. To have known this was one thing, to explain it quite another. Their account of that popular culture, and their account of Atget as well, could only be made from their own position — not exactly inside popular culture (their clothes were a little too fine) and not quite outside it either ... They wrote about it all as Surrealism; they saw it from the threshold of their class. Sometimes they tried to make the popular over in their own image. ... But Atget was not, like the young Aragon, seeking out the low life of the passage de l'Opéra in order to rectify philosophical error; nor did his image of the city rise from the real of ruby lips. Atget's work slipped away from those recently converted to peasantry."

 

[ ... ]

 

"Aragon played a peasant of great sophistication. His dream-work would be done after having left the café — dreams and wine were the consolation for having been stood up. But his dreams, if under the influence, were quite literary, a siren-prostitute singing in the canes, a window that was both an ocean and a Rhine, and an ideal that mocked his cry, his poor, instinctive reaction that was nothing more than a case of mistaken identity. Aragon's odyssey had brought him to the low life that he wanted to join, but it was a life told by bourgeois images and clichés. They moved through his dream like a vaudeville act, a spoof of Verne, a pantomime, a silent screen."

 

"Of course he [Atget] did not share their approach. Atget proceeded toward the
au-delà
using documents and their conventions for obtaining
savoir
. He was still interested in the
measurement
of culture;
difference itself was not being fetishized, nor was the delectation of the form the point
. Aragon and company, on the contrary, were trying to assess popular culture by seeing it according to the conventions by which art was usually understood: they did not go outside their own habits of thought when they crossed the border that Kandinsky called kitsch ... . None of them trusted practical vision to do the job alone. The difference between the practices of
culture
and
savoir
, the difference that was not supposed to stand out so plainly, separated Atget and the younger men [the Surrealists] like oil and water. That difference was at the root of all the friction between him and Man Ray that day in 1926 [when Atget insisted that his photographs were "documents" not art]."

 

All of the above is from Atget's Seven Albums by Molly Nesbit (1992). Bolding in the last paragraph is added by me.

..............

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A viewer can never know a work the way the maker of it does.

I agree, but I do think (IMO) that Nesbit is correct in insisting that he was not only not a surrealist, but that he very much wanted to actively resist any tendency to see his work that way. I think that his connection to the real, to history, to the multi-layered public reality that was very real, not at all surreal, was essential to his way of seeing.

 

Also, Nesbit has an enormous amount of documentation that she gives in the book to back up her take on Atget's work. I tend to think, as you do, that she pushes too hard away from any idea of "art" but maybe that's necessary to resist the opposite tendency (to take him as an artist).

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Reality is often surreal and a good documentarian might very well include that in his work.

 

For example, how could a documentarian studying the rise of Donald Trump and Trumpism in the U.S. today avoid surrealism? It would be dishonest.

 

Reality has become the nightmare!

We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!
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Phil, I think we're getting into two separate tangents here. There's what Atget himself thought his work was about (historical), which is what Nesbit is sorting out; and then there's what we are able to do with his work, regardless of whatever it was that he thought he was doing, which (our using it as it moves us to use it) I think is perfectly valid.

 

The thing I like (I'm not saying anybody else "needs" to like it too) is his noticing, and stating strongly, the difference between responding to the social/cultural layering all around him, as opposed to wanting to play with or inside of his own personal world. I think that if photographers don't notice this explicitly while working, it's easy to slip-slide around between the personal and that which is there without you, that doesn't "need" you as part of the play. Knowing which or whether you are doing one or the other or not gives a cleaner vision, IMO. Atget knew, IMO. IMO IMO IMO ...

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.............

, where photography is its own thing and as a medium doesn't depend on art in order to make something of artistic value

I agree. That's what I was trying to say in my previous post. I also strongly agree that photography's difference is the source of most of our (interesting!) discussions or explorations of this art-document intersection.

 

Atget's work took on a more contemplative and subjective dimension (but still without ever straining for an effect to paraphrase Weston) towards the end of his life in the photographs of trees and those taken at the parks.

Nesbit notices that, too, and I think the following long passage from her really illustrates what we've been trying to sort out. Nesbit reads this as a further elaboration on his pursuit of the 'document' of what he knew. I (and I'm guessing you) can easily see this as very much the attitude of an artist at work even if he didn't notice (or care) about how he had metamorphosed at this point in his life. I think he was so much a photographer that he lived inside of the medium.

 

Here's the Nesbit passage ('technical' means, more or less, showing the things in a useful way for prospective clients):

 

"Around the pond called the Octogone six statues remained, 'most of them terribly damaged: a
Rape of Persephone
, a
Conquered Gaul
killing himself after having slit his wife's throat, a sturdy
Orestes and Pylades
group, an
Apollo
and a
Daphne
, and
Electra and Orestes
, an
Orator
.' "

 

"Atget's work at Sceaux fit into an album, the usual sixty pictures, which took the park at different times of year, looking at the way nature had eroded human achievement, destroying the classical line, the clear form, the
pensée
. His Orestes and Pylades were shown from behind, not because they were better seen or studied that way, but to show the characters from the past contemplating their own bitter fate. The classical past seemed to be surviving by a thread. In his documents the technical signs had been so bent and disregarded that they could not even lend ideological support. These gnarled, opinionated, technical signs kept the document in that space
before
knowledge, as if trying to hold it there indefinitely, away from the modern state.

 

"Atget moved his documents toward closure in the 1920s, closure that would have various functions and various forms. Closure became Atget's last way of locating his positions, making the distinctions, dividing points of view from one another, disputing with notions of universality, positing a class consciousness. Albert Valentin and Pierre MacOrlin tried to pin down the qualities, giving them names, the
fantastique
, the
au-delà
. The line of demarcation itself is perhaps more interesting. It was where the author could express his power, his desire, and his contempt.

 

"Atget expressed all of this repeatedly in the last section of the
Paris pittoresque
. In the 1920s that series had been continued, without benefit of a project comparable to the Bibliothèque Nationale albums to guide it. In 1921 Atget put the prostitutes that he had begun to photograph for Dignimont there and then worked hither and yon on shop fronts, docks, circuses, manikins, the details of the
populaire
. The separations he was building between it and bourgeois culture continued in the direction he had begun in his albums, but he worked the extremities of the
populaire
with an urgency that grew cynical. ... The players were diverse, the manikins macabre. But their theater was popular, their tale immaterial, the point was their
longue durée
even as Paris mechanized, modernized,
à 'lameréicaine
. Atget gave Gilles without Watteau. An exclusive low, a pure low, a low that held itself away from knowledge and financial speculation. Just like the Orestes and Pylades. A low without a high.

 

"Low culture, popular culture was, like death, not a concept to be absorbed and filed away. Atget's point was made. It was a point with a politics, of course, but it was not made using the forms with which political culture was usually expressed, not with a social realism, not with an
art social
, not with a celebration of the worker's body or the
folklorique
. The forms Atget used were those native to the document."

 

I think that last sentence is a lot of what makes Atget so interesting to me, beyond the beauty of his pictures. He's finding, exploring, what *is* native to the photographic document.

..............

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One print was sold for only $1200!

Holy smokes! We missed it! Find out where the new owner lives, check the weather for a dark night, and we'll put on our black woollies and reappropriate that little beauty. Nobody should be allowed to have a real Atget for $1200: we would only be setting things right ...

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