E.J. Bellocq: or reverence not revelation

<p>How much of your own photography, or photography that you enjoy or admire was generated by <em>reverence</em> un-tinged by any ulterior motives (social agendas or artistic ambitions/hopes)? Not discovery, not surprise, not travelogue, not fun, delight, or even love in the broadest sense (that includes babies and pets), but <em>reverence</em> in an almost-but-not-quite religious sense?</p>

<p>As my exemplar, I'm going to use <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._J._Bellocq">E.J. Bellocq</a>, but I think I could also have used Atget or the subject of <a href="/casual-conversations-forum/00cCTj">Sarah Fox's recent thread</a>, O. Winston Link. <em>Not</em> art. <em>Not</em> revelation. <em>Reverence</em>. (Which does not mean that their pictures can't be all of those things to us, the viewer.)</p>

<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._J._Bellocq">Bellocq</a> is known today, exclusively for <a href="https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1687&bih=914&q=bellocq&oq=bellocq&gs_l=img.12..0l9j0i5.1428.4146.0.6725.7.7.0.0.0.0.854.2886.1j1j2j0j1j0j2.7.0....0...1ac.1.32.img..3.4.1291.yBd2rpYCFQI">his photographs of New Orleans prostitutes</a> in the early 1900s. He is described by a personal acquaintance thus: "he was French you know and he had a terrific accent and he spoke in a high-pitched voice, staccato-like, and when he got excited he sounded like an angry squirrel. It's true. And he waddled a little bit like a duck."</p>

<p>... and his head was a very strange shape, and he was short ... He was a somewhat comical figure, and he knew that he was a somewhat comical figure.</p>

<p>.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>"... If he was typical of his calling [he was a "competent" commercial photographer primarily for the shipbuilding companies of the area], he was also a man of modest expectations, alternately a small entrepreneur and a skilled hireling, according to the winds of chance. The portrait of his work desk describes a man of uncultivated tastes and unexercised intellect."</p>

<p>"... [but] Within the span of his horizons, he was perhaps perfect. Confident, at ease, patient, skillful, he allowed the picture to find its own solution. Art, if he thought about it, meant the cheap sentimentalized prints that hung over his work desk. His own pictures were concerned with a more immediate problem -- with satisfying the curiosity of his own eyes. This apetite was the engine that gave his skill a use, and his skill in turn dignified his appetite, by objectifying it, by making of it a picture that existed independent of his own mind and body."</p>

<p>" ... In his own way, in these pictures [of the Storyville prostitutes], Bellocq consummates many love affairs. Johnny Wiggs understood this when he saw, to his amazement, that Bellocq's prostitutes are beautiful. It is true, they are all beautiful. Beautiful innocently or tenderly or wickedly or joyfully or obscenely, but all beautiful, in the sense that they are present, unique, irreplaceable, believable, receptive. Each of these pictures is the product of a successful alliance.</p>

<p>"A skillful photographer can photograph anything well. To do better than that he must photograph what he loves. Some love geometry; some love sunlight on mountains; some love the streets of their city. Bellocq apparently loved women, with the undiscriminating constancy of a genius."<br /> -- <em>all quotes are from John Szarkowski</em></p>

</blockquote>

<p>.<br /> As I said at the top of this post, I am choosing "reverence" over Szarkowski's "love" because the latter would include untold billions of casually snapped pictures of babies and pets, etc. where there is nothing casual about what Bellocq or Atget or O. Winston Link were doing.</p>

<p>I'm especially interested in what Szarkowski describes as his "uncultivated tastes and unexercised intellect." This might also be applied to Atget, and any number of other really good photographers who are (artistically) untrained, hate theory, and insist that their pictures are not art. They seem to me to shoot from the heart, and sometimes I'm jealous of that innocence. They make, to my eye, a distinctively different kind of photograph that can be truly wonderful.</p>

Most of my stuff these days is done in <i>reverence</i> of my subject matter.<div></div>

<p>Reverence to a theme or subject is not exclusive of the artist intention or the intellect. And who can say that Bellocq or Atget possesed neither of these attributes. Appearances and a lack of art-talk by the photographer or his viewers do not necessarily negate intelligence and artistic competence of the former.</p>

<p>On the contrary, partial phrases, hyperbole, dense descriptions without finality, and other aspects of art-talk denote more a decoration employed by the writer (often to make him or her appear more authoritative) as much as anything substantive.</p>

<p>Bruckner loved music, wrote it very well, yet many photos of him give him more an appearance of a country local or bumpkin than an astute composer. Atget may not have philosophised on art but the result of his intelligence is evident in his work. Bellocq, whom I do not know of, seems to have loved the women he photographed and that simplicity of approach may have imbued his images with more genius than those of an MFA.</p>

<p>Reverence or love of a subject is not the only quality that can be brought to the creation of art or a photograph, but it can help insight and perception in some cases and get in the way (induced blindness to certain aspects of the subject matter) in other cases.</p>

<p>I'm not sure "reverence" is the appropriate word in this context; "respect" may be more accurate. "reverence" implies deifying the subject to some extent, something I don't see in Bellocq's work, and certainly not in the work of Joel-Peter Witkin, who apparently has studied the work of Bellocq (among others.)<br /> <br />One interesting side note: Have you noticed an odd similarity between Bellocq and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec? Both were French, somewhat physically deformed and had the same preference for subjects. They also seem to show the same degree of respect for their subjects, although Toulouse-Lautrec's "The Medical Inspection" seems to strain the boundary somewhat:<br /> http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lautrec_rue_des_moulins,_the_medical_inspection_1894.jpg</p>

<p>On the other hand, I think the work of O. Winston Link does show a certain amount of reverence for his subject matter, not only for the trains themselves but the way they fit in our world. Those shots remind me very much of this quote from Thomas Wolfe's <em>Of Time And The River:</em></p>

<blockquote>

<p><em><br /></em><em><br /></em>Trains cross the continent in a swirl of dust and thunder, the leaves fly down the tracks behind them: the great trains cleave through gulch and gulley, they rumble with spoked thunder on the bridges over the powerful brown wash of might rivers, they toil through hills, they skirt the rough brown stubble of shorn fields, they whip past empty stations in the little towns and their great stride pounds its even pulse across America.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Now, if that's not reverence, I don't know what is...</p>

<p>Merry Christmas, everyone!</p>

<p>Well. Most of the stuff is done in reverence to [my]-self basically and yes - the deeply rooted habit which can only be revered, I guess ... to one myself or another, because as time goes the identity gets multiplicated and gradually dissolved in all kinds of copy-working variation interpretation insperation based memory retrolapsing in fluctuations of all kinds. So I think: why make this downwards simplifications for anothe classification as we don't seem to be able to get out of stacking process?</p>

<p>Ilia, we should consult the blue Caterpillar smoking a hookah (of Alice: "one side [of the mushroom] makes you taller; the other side makes you shorter" -- see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Adventures_in_Wonderland#Synopsis">Chapter Five</a>).</p>

<p>I'm interested in this because it seems like an outlier from most theories about photography. For example, back in the mid twentieth-century, in <em>Aperture</em>, Minor White and Walter Chappell tried tentatively to "outline" photography as being of four kinds: documentary, pictorial, informational, and the <em>equivalent</em> (from Steiglitz).</p>

<p>Sarkowski does not like those categories and proposes, rather, a continuum from "those who think of photography as a means of self-expression and those who think of it as a method of exploration." As examplars of the poles of that continuum, he offers Minor White and <em>Aperture</em> magazine while he was editor there (self-expression) and Robert Frank -- <em>The Americans </em>(exploration). He is quick to note that you can pick out examples in the work of each of these that seems to be characteristic of the other -- it's the overall "type" that he's considering.</p>

<p>However, to my eye, the work of Bellocq and Link and Atget is not documentary (which abhors beauty), is not pictorial (it is not narrative), is not informational (I don't think these photographers are particularly interested in our education), and certainly not equivalent in the sense of being something/anything other than what they are. They are also not expressive of self, nor are they explorations.</p>

<p>Rather, what I see is in 'reverent' photography is repetition. <em>Reverent</em> repetition in the same sense that a Catholic goes to Mass. Ritual, over and over and over joyous, satisfying (to the photographer) sameness. In addition, the process of "doing" this repetition seems to me to be meaningful <em>because</em> it is a repetition, a reverencing of that which is being done -- apart from the resulting photograph. The act of doing it seems to make it fresh even though it is exactly the same (kind) of thing that's generated. It is a confirmation, not an exploration or an expression.</p>

<p>William Kahn, I see both Witkin and Toulouse-Lautrec as very intentionally artists. I don't see the photographers of my OP as considering themselves or their work to be artists/art.</p>

<p>Arthur, can you see what makes reverence different or even in conflict with discovery/exploration/expression?</p>

<p>Norman Naffington, can you say why you think your work is not artistic (it seems that way to me -- in a good way) or not about exploration/discovery?</p>

<p>"Arthur, can you see what makes reverence different or even in conflict with discovery/exploration/expression?" Julie, yes, in some cases, but I have to think more about that. What I like in what you say is that reverential can be of a form like the oft repeated dogma of a liturgy, while it can at the same time also be a series of photographs on a same theme (as Bellocq or Link), as for example in your own created compositions, which you probably do not consider mainly as being reverential (maybe a very small component thereof and linked to the main subjects?). Once a photographer engages in a series of work, he or she has increased difficulty I think in not invoking the discovery/exploration/expression approach. Can they not become an exploration/expression of a revered thing or topic?</p>

<p>Sarkowski was apparently referring mainly to photographic art in suggesting only two types of approaches or results, as the documentary and basic informational forms of photography can be distinct from them and also exist. Maybe he folds these latter pursuits into the exploration category together with photographic art examples.</p>

<p>I remember spending a good amount of time on Bellocq in school - the conclusion we came to then is the same I hold now that I read your post - that "reverence" is a good way to verbalize what he was doing. Being somewhat of an "outsider" himself, Bellocq was showing these women who were also societal outcasts as worthwhile people. He was propping up their humanity - revering them as people and not the sexual objects their customers would take them for. And as in a lot of great portraiture (or social documentary) the subjects have a relationship with the photographer which is evident in the way they confront the camera. For me, the body of work seems to say "you need to look at these women for more than the sum of their parts." Since it seems this work is the only that survives the photographer, it was clearly very important work to him personally, and his general reverence (Websters defines that as "Honor or respect felt or shown") for the ladies as people is there for the seeing. </p>

<p>Matthew, I hadn't thought of "reverence" as simply another way of showing honor and/or respect. That aspect of it, I can understand. For me, "reverence" has at least a tinge of awe as well, and several dictionary definitions support that. It also can have religious overtones. For the latter reasons, I would reject the notion of reverence as a means to prop up someone's humanity. Reverence, IMO, tends to put someone on a pedestal and actually remove them rather than bring them close. This probably shows my bias against religion and deities. I would prefer the word "humanize" to "revere" for what you're suggesting he was doing. I agree with you that portraiture, in many ways, is a matter of relationship. I think one could certainly explore a reverential relationship one has to a subject, but I'm not sure that would always prop up their humanity. It could, in fact, just turn them into a different sort of an object. And I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing.</p>

<p>I like Arthur's idea of "repeated dogma of liturgy." I, too, think repeated attention to a subject can be fascinating.</p>

<p>Matthew, I don't think Bellocq was "showing" the women to anybody. I think the pictures were private acts.</p>

<p>Like the moon (which I have just been looking at in a frosty pre-dawn sky). It's always there. It always amazes me -- I feel reverence in the sight of it -- <em>because</em> it is always the same (that's why it is "the" moon). I would be upset if it changed, and yet I love looking at it because its sameness always has a different face. But it is the sameness that I search for -- that ultimately satisfies me. Ditto for sunrise, sunset and all those other phenomena that our ancestors reverenced.</p>

<p>Or maybe <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-six_Views_of_Mount_Fuji">thirty-six views of Mt. Fuji</a>.</p>

<p>Our ancestors revered natural phenomena by deifying them.</p>

<p>Maybe the moon and the sun are easy marks because they're heavenly.</p>

<p>Some of our ancestors revered thunder more than anything else. Thunder is not s constant like the moon. I don't think constancy was the key to reverence.</p>