"The Ground Beneath Her Feet"

[Kent Shafer]

<p>I just finished reading "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" by Salman Rushdie and would be interested in the thoughts of others here on its extensive philosophizing on the subject of photography. (One line of thinking: A photograph takes the life from a person by making him or her motionless, flat, and often colorless, yet at the same time confers a sort of immortality. Death begets life.)</p>

<p>For those who haven't read it, I'd give it a high recommendation if you're a Rushdie fan (I am) or think you might be. The narrator and one of the three main characters is a photographer. While photography is not the book's main theme, it is one important facet of a wild, swirling, richly metaphorical story.</p>

[jtk]

<p>Interesting. Perhaps Rushdie's Islamic roots are part of the story: the proscription against graven images, which for the most fundamental Islamists reportedly includes making pictures of people...not just proscribing pictures of Mohammed. Very similar to the views of the most conservative of Jews. The "graven" images" that are forbidden are not just those of idols to alternative deities for either group, despite what one may have heard in Sunday school.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>John, it's probably more clear to refer to "the most ORTHODOX of Jews" rather than "the most conservative of Jews." There are three main divisions of Jews: Orthodox (the most religious and observant), Conservative (more modern and somewhat less stringent), and Reform (quite liberal and not following many of the rituals and observances). A conservative Jew leans toward the liberal side of Judaism, in terms of practice and belief. You won't find a conservative Jew unwilling to have his picture taken because of a prohibition against graven images.</p>

<p>It would be a very, very rare Jew, indeed, even among the most Orthodox, who would prohibit the taking of pictures of people. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aniconism_in_Judaism">READ HERE</a>. Picture taking would be prohibited on Sabbath and certain Holidays, but for reasons other than a prohibition against graven images. The prohibition would be against work on the Sabbath, which also pertains to things like turning lights on, driving, etc.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2006/03/19/street-photography-and-the-prohibition-against-graven-images-when-artistic-expression-clashes-with-religion/">THIS STORY</a> is about an Orthodox Jew who sued a Manhattan street photographer who took his picture, claiming an infringement of his religious freedom. I'd have to know more, but it seems perhaps Mr. Nussenzweig was citing a passage that most Orthodox Jews don't see as relating to photographs at all. One has to wonder if Mr. Nussenzweig was simply pissed and overreaching a bit with the citations of scripture.<br /> ____________________________<br /> As for the Rushdie line in the OP, it's hard to comment on that without having more context. The quote taken by itself strikes me as a bad metaphor. Photographs operate metaphorically, and I would choose a different way to capture how portraits work. I'd consider empathy, expression, introduction, and likeness before considering death and rebirth . . . speaking of what one hears in Sunday school.</p>

[luis_g]

<p> Just in case anyone here doesn't know this already, Mr. Nussenzweig's case was dismissed in court.</p>

<p> Judge Tom wrote: "In this matter, it is plaintiff who, in the name of the exercise of religion, attempts to enlist the assistance of the courts of this state to restrict defendants’ freedom to disseminate a work of general public interest, and, to that end, the courts are forbidden to lend their assistance in contravention of the First Amendment protection conferred upon freedom of expression."</p>

<p>The picture is a strong portrait:</p>

<p>http://www.shanelavalette.com/journal/2007/03/28/nussenzweig-v-dicorcia-lawsuit-dismissed/</p>

<p>_____________________________________________</p>

<p> Sontag would not have agreed with Fred's: "I'd consider empathy, expression, introduction, and likeness before considering death and rebirth . . ."</p>

<p>She considered this:</p>

<p>"To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have. <strong>To photograph is to turn people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.</strong> To photograph someone is a sublimated murder, just as the camera is the sublimation of a gun. Taking pictures is a <em><strong>soft murder</strong></em>, appropriate to a sad, frightened time."</p>

 

[jtk]

<p>Fred, I'm sure we all recognize that there are conventional Western categories of Jews, but I wasn't thinking of any of them when said "conservative." The term doesn't belong to any congregation, especially not in the US.</p>

<p>I was thinking specifically of the Taliban-types, some of whom even consider writing taboo...so they memorize. Freud wrote about that fwiw.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Luis, I recognize the significance of what Sontag, also, is saying. For me, it's a compelling and limited look at what a photograph can be. I, personally, wouldn't employ her descriptions any more than Rushdie's. Call me a photographic heretic for not towing the death-murder-gun-rape party line. I like Sontag's description a little more than Rushdie's because it lacks the religiosity of the latter. But, in my mind, with these quotes, they describe only one angle of a process and product that has much more depth than their metaphors capture. It would be hard for me to quote one or two writers and/or photographers and come up with a satisfying metaphor for photography. I prefer my own descriptions and use others' quotes more as a backdrop than as a hatchet.</p>

[luis_g]

<p>Fred, I just hauled her quote out to be playful. Don't think for a minute that I agree with it. And, no, I wouldn't call you a photo-heretic. :-)</p>

[don_essedi]

<p>"A photograph takes the life from a person by making him or her motionless, flat, and often colorless, yet at the same time confers a sort of immortality. Death begets life."</p>

<p>I do not know if this is the author's sentiment or that of a character in the novel; I'll just take it as a statement. It requires me to assume death is colorless and flat, and as well that death is motionless. A "sort of immortality" is basically 'mortality'. I can't get from the statement to the conclusion "death begets life". These analogies or metaphors regarding photographs are used with nuance by others.</p>

<p>I feel the need to add "The photograph is not the photographed"</p>

<p> </p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Luis, I first read Sontag's <em>On Photography</em> after I'd been shooting seriously for about a year. At that time, I was snapping a lot of candids of people who were unaware of me, kind of slinking in the shadows . . . Fred the stealth man. When I read Sontag, I could really relate to what she was saying and still think she nailed something. It also gave me the creeps. Over time, I realized the level of discomfort I felt shooting like that and started adopting new approaches and philosophies. I still experience fear and tension, and I even still get creeped out sometimes, but I prefer the energy I put out and get back now, coming out of the shadows more and reaching out with my camera rather than shooting <em>at</em> people with it. I give myself more options these days and, on the occasions that I still do use my camera as a gun, I'm a little more aware I'm doing it. Being in touch with that, as an option rather than a default, makes a difference.</p>

[luis_g]

<p> I read Sontag's book when it came out. Many of her ideas are those of a non-practicing, brilliant and disconnected theoretician. I've owned guns, engaged in competition pistol shooting, hunted, <em>and</em> also owned cameras and photographed my entire life. While I can appreciate what she says ideologically, my personal experience disagrees with many of her insights.</p>

<p>In some ways what she says is like a virgin genius talking about sex from watching others do it. Her insights into illness were far better, IMO, because she knew first-hand what she was talking about.</p>

<p> </p>

[don_essedi]

<p>Did Sontag believe that to be photographed is to have one's soul stolen, too?</p>

<p> </p>

[Kent Shafer]

<p>Just to clarify slightly: the bit in my original post about life and death and so on isn't a quote but rather my own paraphrasing of one of the ideas in the book.</p>

<p>Here's a quote, from the chapter titled "The Decisive Moment," describing the narrator's encounter with a famous French photographer:</p>

<blockquote>

<p>He took small steps, this way, that way, until he settled. Then, frozen in a half stoop, he waited, Leica at the ready. His patience, his stillness, was inhuman, predatory. I understood that I was watching a master of invisibility at work, an artist, an occultist. He would dissolve while I watched him, he became simply not-there, an absence, until the little scene he was stalking satisfied him, and then, click, he would fire off a single shot and rematerialize. He must indeed be a master marksman, I thought, to need no more than one.</p>

</blockquote>

[thomas_sullivan]

<p>having lived most of my life photographing other things than people...except for my own family...I kind of identified with what Sontag said. Then a few extremely good street photographers entered my life and I saw how they handled the human subject on the streets, that chance encounter and I saw something else.</p>

<p>Until that time I had always enjoyed watching people. Not to "murder them softly", but to witness the interactions among people. It is really fascinating to watch a person for an extended period of time and try to guess their next move. You learn a lot about human nature this way</p>

<p>That lust to get into your subjects mind is what these street photographers showed me in their pics and I, knowing how to do it without a camera, wanted to experiment with it using a camera. To study human nature. To guess what the next movement will be and capture it. Not a murder, but a small glimpse into another person's world. Hopefully as they see it.........even if they won't recognize it themselves...or refuse to admit it....it is them.</p>

<p>So, I'm taking street shots for about 7 yrs and then I read Sontag............I'm going to guess, that if she ever did street....or candid.....pics of people, she only got into it for a very limitted time. It was a long time coming that I felt comfortable taking pics of people I didn't know. And most of it was because of societies ill thoughts on the subject. Oh, I'm sure there are "murderous" photographers out there. But the bulk of the better street photographers are visual psychologists. Watching human nature unfold during daily life and capturing the key moments. Perhaps it might be called.....The heavens above her head.</p>

[luis_g]

<p>In the quote I cited, Sontag was talking about the "...<em>act of taking a picture",</em> the very act of taking a picture, <em>all</em> pictures. All pictures ever taken by all the photo-junkies (as Sontag referred to them) that ever lived, From Daguerre to you. All murders...</p>

<p>____________________________________________</p>

<p> </p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p><em>"until the little scene he was stalking satisfied him"</em></p>

<p>I think Luis's pointing out that Sontag wrote as an outsider is important. The character in Rushdie's book who describes the photographer this way also sounds like an outsider, not so much to photography as much as to his own world. Rushdie (the Rushdie character) is describing what a lot of people believe about photography and what many photographs show, that it's a passive capturing, a matter of waiting to be satisfied, a stillness. Other photographers make it a making, an act, a creation, and a dance.</p>

<p>Interesting questions. Do you stalk or engage? Is it an either/or question? Do you shoot to satisfy yourself? </p>

[luis_g]

<p><strong>Personal note</strong>: I just got back from a bike ride in the heat, on my single-speed MTB. The Mrs. and I were cooling off sitting in the shade by the esplanade around the museum downtown while these two 40-something ladies photographed all around us with 75-300mm zooms. Both stalked us and I took a little perverse pleasure in staring back, with a smile. Neither of them dared make a snap. They took a break, sitting just a few feet away, and I talked with them asking how come they hadn't taken our picture. "Because you knew we wanted to" was the answer. "So what? Go ahead." They were thrilled, and proceeded to blaze away, probably snapping 100+ exposures between them in less than 2 minutes, my wife giggling in the background. It was like being in a Cortazar story.</p>

[don_essedi]

<p>:Interesting questions. Do you stalk or engage? Is it an either/or question? Do you shoot to satisfy yourself?"</p>

<p>We describe new things in terms of old things, by analogy, simile, or metaphor. Photographing something with a camera is like shooting at a target with a gun. A camera has a sight, a barrel, it is loaded, one pushes a button like pulling a trigger. Like all analogies it can only be taken so far before it breaks down. Nothing issues out of the barrel of the lens and impacts the target, for example. For those who prefer 'make' instead of 'take', do you want to make out with the subject? Do you want to make them? Or, like a policeman, do you make the "person of interest"? Are you running a make on someone?</p>

<p>I take a picture when I think I see a photograph. It doesn't matter what it is in my sight;; it only matters that it looks like a photogarph. I watch the scene, something catches my attention, I shoot or not depending on my own criteria.</p>

<p>I'm hunting photographs, not people or any "subject". I stalk the wild photograph and capture it if I can. Sometimes people importune me to kill them, violate them; they must be suicidal, I guess. If I "engage", are we engaged? By taking a photograph have I made a proposal of marriage?</p>

<p> </p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Don, I want to <em>make</em> a photograph. And I often <em>engage</em> by catching someone's eye, talking with them, being with them. Marriage? No.</p>

<p>Luis, the voyeur being invited to become the third in a <em>menáge à trois</em>. Nice to help someone out of the closet!</p>

[fate_faith_change_chains]

<p>Making / taking, of course first we take a picture before we can <em>make</em> one ( if we would want to ), the photographs foundation being both in matter and in spirit. I've never found the gun analogy to be a particular good one, guns <em>take</em> more than camera's do, if ever, the camera creates, even when it takes.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Phylo, I often start the making (creating) long before I do the taking.</p>

[don_essedi]

<p>It is better for me to not conceptualize my acts of photography as "make", so I prefer "take". I hope to capture the real and not the "hyper real" (Baudrillard), the authentic, not the "authentic fake" (Eco) -- to use their terminology.</p>

<p> </p>

[fate_faith_change_chains]

<p>Fred, yes, but arguably it is only the very moment that one actually takes the picture that it can only then be considered of also having been *made* <em>as an image </em> ( latent on the neg or in 'ones and zeros' on the card ) , whether or not part of the making went well before - or long after - the taking. Otherwise, the making part before it might as well be considered more in the realm of performance / conceptual art if put "too much" emphasis on as an element seperate from the photograph. The picture after all only "is" <em>as such</em> the moment it's taken.</p>

[jtk]

<p>It's interesting (to me) how rarely philosophizers seem to be passionate about literature, theatre and the like.</p>

<p>Rushdie is actually an "artist" IMO, as opposed to philosopher. One creates, the other assembles verbal structures, then analyzes them...I think that's the distinction.</p>

<p><strong>per the OT: The idea that a photograph flattens subjects, simultaneously making them immortal</strong>, seems to me to work pretty well, especially online (given the mortality of printed photographs and the seeming immortality of Internet records).</p>

<p>A biography or autobiography, to take the thoughts further, may not so much "flatten" as distort or reinvent selectively. However, bio and autobio, like a good novel, may almost literally create/invent a substantial (ie "real"), if different human being.</p>

<p><strong>Bloomsday</strong> is June 16. People versed in English (perhaps Irish) Lit often know that is the day James Joyce created in Ulysses, substantially for Leopold Bloom. Lit nutcases (like me, to a degree) often agree that this is the finest novel in our language, with Joyce being comparable in "greatness" (whatever that is) to Shakespeare. Many of us would say that Leopold Bloom is a) eternal and b) more "real" than any deceased person because once a deceased person is dead, his "reality" (or non-flatness) consists of the artistry and depth of the information that remains...ie <strong>Bloom is now more real than, say, Elvis, and not nearly as "flattened." </strong></p>

<p> </p>

[fate_faith_change_chains]

<p>Only in an imaginary way Holden Caulfield - another fictional character - is more <em>real </em>than all the other "phoneys" who aren't. Does this mean that the imaginary refers to the character's imagination or our own, imagining the character ? The thing is, Elvis' voice can still be heard and unicorns are a reality too !</p>

[don_essedi]

<p>"...whether or not part of the making went well before - or long after - the taking. "</p>

<p>Too much "well before" and "long after" and the "taking" is merely a necessary evil that can be left to an assistant or intern.</p>

<p>Taking with film and developing or with a digital camera set to jpeg or tiff is irreversible; a commitment is made -- there is that 'making' in the taking whether the scene is happened upon or is a Promethean creation. Otherwise, commitment can be deferred or never made. There is that 'making' to be done, imo, for the photograph to be made.</p>

<p> </p>