To every thing there is a season

[charleswood]

<p>Turner "I see them [photographs] as contributors to, rather than records of, our culture."</p>

<p>Yet same as to a novel, a painting, and so on with each divorced from the real sequence of life and none <em>just</em> a record of our culture. In that sense, all art, not just photography, is monument on a grave, our chance to eulogize ourselves at our own funerals. Art, like any eulogy, is suspect, and that is part of the fun of it. So Julie is right, we don't usually think of the future in <em>that</em> way as we do art as part of creating culture.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>Art can be either a good or bad eulogy. Leni Riefenstahl's photos . . . in giving a propagandistic and obviously one-sided view of the Third Reich, leave behind an important record of the Nazis and their self-view, even while the photos helped propagate and continue a "culture" of will, hate, and deadly idealism and superiority. Her photos are in some sense false but in another sense chillingly revealing. The revelations of art about a culture can be more effective and significant than records of it.</p>

<p>I recently saw an exhibit of so-called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_art">Degenerate Art</a>. This was the art a lot of which was destroyed by Hitler because it was obfuscating and tainted in his mind. Next to the remnants of Expressionism and Modernism that survived Hitler's axe were approved Nazi paintings and sculptures. They were clearer and record not <em>the</em> reality but a different reality, of which there were many at the time . . . as today.</p>

<p>Compare all that to the surviving photos from the Nazi death camps which provide, in so many cases, a necessary and fitting eulogy and remembrance.</p>

<p>Not all photos function as "art." And ones I see as art can be good or bad at recording their era and culture, some are even both good and bad in the same breath.</p>

<p>As Charles says, photos can be "divorced from the real sequence of life" which can *sometimes* give them just the objectivity necessary to become good records of what they depict. In many other cases, their being divorced from particular context or their subject matter being divorced from its context, will make for an inaccurate or vague record.</p>

<p>It may not be as much about what we who create the art think as what those who look at the art think. Whether I think about my photos this way or that won't mean that someone won't see something in them that reveals things about me I may not have been in touch with at the time. I often get comments on my work that suggest that a photo gives a more in-depth picture of myself than I might have thought. I was busy taking the picture and being in the moment and the viewer is divorced from all that and might just pick up on something deeper going on which my being part of the process helped keep hidden from me.</p>

[AlanKlein]

<p>Just an aside. I just finished reading On Photography by Susan Sontag (soft cover). If anyone would like to read it, just email me your address and I'll send it to you. No charge. First email gets it. The only thing I request is that when you're done with it, please pass it on to others who would also like to read it.</p>

[Julie H]

<p>.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>'<a href="https://unrealnature.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/boubat_girlwithleaves.jpg">Little Girl with Dead Leaves</a>' was indeed my first photograph.<br>

... I was walking through the Jardin du Luxembourg after the war, in 1946. I had a Rollei camera that I'd bought by selling my big dictionaries. I was still twenty years old. I was a poet, I was in love. And of course, I wasn't thinking about any of that at all. When your life is all ahead of you, all you want to do is live. And then years have passed by; the leaves fall every autumn. You don't say no to beauty, you don't say no to opportunity. When you've found something once, can you ever give it up again? The photo just happened.</p>

<p>Just one. A very poor negative developed in a makeshift lab. Am I still twenty years old today? Am I still in love? If I say yes, I still have a chance of finding that light.</p>

<p>I sometimes walk through the Jardin du Luxembourg and I have never seen another little girl dressed in dead leaves. Every little girl is a little girl for the first time and everyone and everything I meet are just as I saw them for the first time. There is no such thing as a first photo. There are only new photos. The light is brand new today. — <em>Édouard Boubat, 1992</em></p>

</blockquote>

<p>.</p>

<p>.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>There is much more in me that does not change than that does change. My eyes see only the things that change. But my heart sometimes knows the things that do not change. — <em>Édouard Boubat, 1999</em></p>

</blockquote>

<p>.</p>

[charleswood]

<p>Thanks Julie for 'Little Girl with Dead Leaves', love it.</p>

[Julie H]

<p>.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>It's about the end of days ... not unlike the way photos of East European Jews, taken in the thirties, lock one into their doom. Men look up from their work at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Vishniac#1935.E2.80.931939">Vishniac</a> or some other photographer; children laugh at play, and the photographic print might as well be a brick wall because we who know their torture and murder can't help them, can't warn them. Such photography tastes the diabolism it precedes. This foretaste is one of photography's qualities. Both the subject and the fate of the subject are past but maybe there <em>is</em> a future tense in photography after all because when we are provoked to remember, we also look forward, in trepidation or in hope or in presentiment. — <em>R.B. Kitaj</em></p>

</blockquote>

<p>.</p>

 

[Julie H]

<p>On the judgment of history, this anecdote about Paul Outerbridge, who, in his day was a pretty big cheese:</p>

<p>In 1950, on a trip up the California coast, Outerbridge visited Edward Weston at his home/studio. "Outerbridge had brought a selection of his best platinum and carbro prints to share with Weston but politely declined when Weston suggested that they trade a print or two. Once back in the car, Outerbridge exclaimed, 'Can you belive that guy? He wanted to trade one of his photographs for one of mine!' After all, Outerbridge had sold his photographs for between $300 and $1,000 each in the late 1930s, while Weston had difficulty selling his for $25 in 1951."</p>

<p>In fairness, though by the end of his life Outerbridge was to slip into obscurity, he has lately (early 2000s) been rediscovered and his work, which is interestingly strange and has a very distinct style, newly appreciated.</p>

[clive_murray_white]

<p>I read through this thread a few days ago and even then felt that we may be missing something, and as I'm fairly slow its taken me a while to realise what it may be. Putting aside all the evidence of artists attempting to guarantee their own immortality by ensuring that their work is prominent collections where future generations will "stumble" across it, and maybe reassess it, I'll move into a different view altogether.</p>

<p>I have more than a sneaking suspicion that when we look at the work of previous generations we actually use the eyes of the present, because in effect, that's all we can do. To use a pretty extreme example I have often wondered why we are drawn to Greek and Roman antiquities, especially when we know that they were made for very different reasons than display in our museums. Damaged, eroded by time, completely out of context and, if the original artist saw them now, bound to cause a great deal of embarrassment and pain. I suggest we subconsciously see them as very adequate metaphors for how we see the state of humanity and our planet right now - so they are, for very different reasons, as new as the day they were made. </p>

<p>Clearly this applies to old photography as well - just simple things like the changes in the style of lighting, that we use now, compared to even mid 20c, radically alter the "look" of anything - so we really do see everything in the "light" of the present.</p>

[Julie H]

<p><strong><a href="https://unrealnature.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/bandw_comic.jpg">LINK</a></strong> for Clive.</p>

[ashleypomeroy]

Firstly, I haven't read the responses. Taking your points in order: transience. I remember the first time I visited in St Mark's Square, Venice, pondering whether I should enjoy the experience or run around taking pictures of everything. It struck me that St Mark's Square had been around since before I was born and would be around long after I am dead, so I could take my time. Plenty of things will be around more than fifty years from now in broadly similar form. Of course St Mark's Square hasn't been around *forever* and it might be obliterated in a few centuries by the waves, but humanity has lost a great deal. We lost the ancient wonders of the world. There will be new wonders.

 

Fifty years from now the people will be dead or old, but again there will be new people to replace them, hopefully better and more interesting people. For those subjects that are born to die, a photographer can only take a snapshot of a moment, to present to an audience that is moving through time, in a culture that is moving through time; this is inevitable and you have to accept it. We are nomads drifting along on shifting sands.

 

There comes a time when you realise that your culture, your art, your education and upbringing were not the objective single truth. And that your history books were just one telling of events, and that the world you grew up in was just a small bubble that will eventually shrivel and pop. You realise that in the States they have no idea who Tony Hancock was; and I imagine that in India and China they are unaware of Parks & Recreation or the career of Robin Thicke, or indeed The Byrds, who were huge in America, not so much here in the UK, probably meaningless in China. We all all specks, and the camera pulls back and there are billions of us, clumped in larger specks that shift and fade.

 

Within living memory the European Powers *were* the whole of the meaningful world, with China and India and Africa as useful deposits of raw materials with some people living there. Five hundred years from now it will be *their* world - if not nationalities, then religions - and they probably won't care much for Edward Weston or European photographic art of the 20th century. They will have their own culture and art, and five hundred years further on they will be obliterated as well. To paraphrase Half-Life 2, one day all we cherish will be a thin layer of plastic ten metres beneath the topsoil. "Uncle Claudius, I wasn't the Messiah after all, would you believe that?"

 

The same is true of iconic news photographs. As a British person I am acutely aware of the fact that the things my grandfather and great-grandfather thought of as objectively important are now a thin layer of brass and bakelite; there were probably iconic news photographs of the second Boer War, but they mean nothing now. The same will gradually happen to the American Civil War, the Great War, Vietnam. Things date and age. You can try to keep them alive, but it's like a dam; the longer you hold back the tide, the faster the reservoir will empty when the dam finally breaks. If history is strong it will preserve itself.

 

And yet Julia Margaret Cameron's "Iago" still makes people pause, because the man is very handsome and the photograph is voluptuously beautiful. No matter that the model was just a hired model and that Cameron didn't have anything to say. The times, the technology, everything else is gone except for that man's face, which still makes women go weak at the knees. People are still the same, and until we evolve into blobs or develop nanotechnology we will respond to simple images of attractive people, or images of people doing something we can relate to. The simple stuff lasts, simple animal stuff. Childbearing hips, pornography, appealing people, the shallow silly stupid stuff of everyday life. We don't need to know why the kid with the big wine bottles has those bottles, the image is appealing because he looks triumphant and we were kids as well. The man about to jump into the puddle didn't quite avoid the water, and never will; we will never know what happened next, he is frozen forever. In my opinion art is the process of stimulating the minds of strangers who have not yet been born.

 

Point two, the pepper. In theory art as pure form *should* be timeless. Art that has a kind of objective connection with the human vision should should last just as long as human beings see the world in a certain world. In contrast, art that derives its value from knowledge of the story behind the art, or of the theory, is subject to two entropic forces. Firstly the art itself dates; secondly the theory because muddled with the passing. I always use the example of The Transformers, the popular toy range. The toys were launched in Japan under the Diaclone name, with no attempt at a story or charaterisation, and they flopped; they were relaunched in the West a year later with a comic, a cartoon, characterisation, and they were hugely popular, because the toys suddenly had meaning. The toys were the same, but now they had meaning. Eventually they will be just toys again, as meaningless as Dan Dare and Brassneck and forgotten superheroes and ancient Greek gods. They will be old plastic and metal toys from long ago, mantelpiece ornaments, because ultimately they're neat toys but I can't see people of the future idolising them.

 

But human beings love stories; they pass them down from generation to generation, and have done so for thousands of years. People love to think of Van Gogh as a tragic, haunted failure, and will tell stories about him for centuries to come, even if the stories no longer reflect reality. Nobody alive today knew Van Gogh, he is already mostly legend, an appealing legend that is easy to pass on. We remember the Greek gods because their stories were complex enough to be entertaining but were ultimately based on archetypes that date back to before history. Tragic lovers, boastful warriors, beautiful people cursed by envy, the successful king who had one fatal flaw, all of these will exist as long as we exist.

 

If I'm driving to a thesis, it's that story-based art will survive because people will generate or pass down the story, and the art will survive, albeit that the artist's original intentions may be forgotten. Form-based art on the other hand is "form that craves art", with the problem that the art is just an illustration of something lurking in the human vision system. Weston's pepper is a striking image that will eventually be replaced by imitations, or made obsolete by advances in technology. Why should we remember Weston's pepper, and not the exact same image shot by someone else? Who owns form? The form will survive long after the art has gone, which is unfortunate if you expect that your portfolio of abstract compositions will live on after you are dead.

 

Point ninety-seven: Time's effect on my own work. If human history is a train driving into the future, my work is asleep in bed because I decided to have a lie-in that day. I've been on the internet since before Photo.net and Flickr existed, and I can state with confidence that most if not all of the work exhibited here and elsewhere is "not even wrong". It doesn't exist on the spectrum of good or bad. It's just blank empty nothingness. Neither technically gifted nor meaningful nor honest. This includes my own work. In my opinion internet photographers who aspire to art are actually killing themselves, because they're perverting and obliterating whatever honest, unaffected truth they might have captured.

 

We would all be better off just taking snapshots of our families, because a hundred years from now someone might look at those snapshots and think "these people were like me; I wonder if they were happy? What were they like? What life did they lead?" No-one will remember you, or the people in the pictures; if your motivating force is the pursuit of personal immortality or lasting fame, your ghost will have a very disappointing afterlife. He will witness your life's work fade and vanish. The men and women who built and launched Voyager 2 did so in the knowledge that they would not be around to see how far it got. Not be around to see it fall into a star, or simply evaporate over the course of twenty trillion years. They were motivated by what they would learn in their own lifetimes.

 

Doomed to die. You know what happens after you die? Nothing. Your brain ceases to function. The universe is just a set of electromagnetic forces whirling about for no reason at all, it will eventually unravel into nothingness. There is no meaning, no end, nothing. And so forth. I could opine at great length on this topic, but the problem is that it takes a lot of work and it's just going to end up at the bottom of page three of a comments thread. It doesn't benefit me in this life and I was bored. And of course it will be dust in the wind when Photo.net goes away. That's a thousand words, let's not count the final paragraph. As always I meant every word and I am sincere. And as I hit submit there will be jitter and the formatting will be wrong, and the words I strove over will be made to look silly.

[cyanatic]

<blockquote>

<p>Julie: In fifty years, everything that is in your photographs will be dead, gone, or changed beyond all recognition.<br>

Do you take this into consideration when crafting your pictures?</p>

</blockquote>

<p>No, and yes. To a greater or lesser degree, in whatever creative endeavors I have undertaken in my life, I have always given some thought to whether or not anyone will see it and care after I am gone. But that thought does not shape what I do. So in that sense I craft what I craft, photograph what I photograph, but without intentionally aiming at posterity. The Van Dyke quote regarding Lange pretty much sums it up for me. Given the incredible amount of noise and photographic output that goes on these days, however, the odds of anyone noticing are, well...not good to say the least. But if my goal were to stand out, I sure as hell wouldn't be putting out black and white street photographs in the first place. As a pure historical record, who knows what will be found to be of interest in 50 or 100 years? </p>

<p> </p>

<blockquote>

<p>She sees the final criticism of her work in the reaction to it of some person who might view it fifty years from now. It is her hope that such a person would see in her work a record of the people of her time, a record valid of the day and place wherein made ... — <em>Willard Van Dyke</em><em><br /></em></p>

</blockquote>

<p><em> </em><br>

<em> </em><br>

<em><br /></em>I liked Ashley Pomeroy's post. A bit bleak in spots (even for me), but not without a nicely dry sense of humor. You need to post more in here, Ashley.</p>

[Julie H]

<p>Steve -- and every other reasonably competent and active photographer reading this post -- I am going to prove to you that fifty years from now you will be as important to the viewers of that time as Winogrand, Davidson, Klein, etc. Your name may or may not be remembered, but the work that you have done will be just as important. I will even argue that, in some ways, your work is <em>more</em> useful than theirs.</p>

<p>If I want to see something that is either spatially, or in this case, temporally out of my sight, I need a tool. I'm going to use the x-ray as my analog. When an x-ray is made, are only the bright areas informative? No. The dark areas are <em>just as essential</em> to the conveyance of information to the person reading the x-ray. Not only are they essential, it is critical that I know that those areas were probed as thoroughly and as sensitively as the areas that are bright and detailed. <em>The former is dependent on the latter</em> (and, of course, vice versa).</p>

<p>For some parts of the plate to be un-probed (un-x-rayed, un-photographed) is to leave me with no idea that nothing was there. The key is knowing that the area was 'looked at' by eyes or x-rays that are as good as those that found things. The dark areas of a negative/print are just as important to the image as are the bright formative eye-catchers.</p>

<p>Why might famous photographers be less useful than you, as written in the first paragraph? Suppose the sensors in your x-ray machine responded unevenly. Some were really, really sensitive -- random 25 megapixel units in a sensor that is otherwise 10 megapixel. How much meaning gets conveyed in the resulting x-rays? Or think of an orchestra with no conductor, or a really deranged one, or one that the players ignore. The violins are whispering when they should be shouting; the horns are going crazy when they should be strictly background.</p>

<p>You can say, who cares, it's art, not documentary. To which I would say, it is the peculiar condition of photography to always be documentary. As Winogrand said in one of his 'Duh!' statements (in which he is at his best), "Documentary? Documentary? show me a photograph that is not documentary! Let's not overstate the obvious!"</p>

<p>Between you and the fifty-year viewer, we find the 'developer' -- making the bright bright and the dark dark -- of this time-x-ray. That would be ... ? First, you and I and all the other like/dislikers. Then the book publishers, then the galleries, then the museum or private collection curators. Richard Storr wrote that Alfred Barr, first director of MoMA said that "seven out of ten things bought by museum curators of his day were likely to not stand the test of time ... . He was quite comfortable with that ratio, and he was, in fact, encouraging people to risk real failures in order that they get that thirty percent right. One of the things that's been interesting about these shows we've done recently -- there are all kinds of problems within them, not all of them succeed -- but one of the interesting things is, when you bring some of that stuff out, remarkably some of it freshens up, and even before we decided what was on the floor."</p>

<p>He's writing about painting -- where the x-ray isn't dependent on anybody being somewhere in time/place. In photography, filling in the blanks as a 'probed' -- informative, meaningful -- darkness rather than just dead meaningl<em>ess</em> space requires that <em>somebody was there</em>, and I claim that that somebody (all of us reasonably competent or better photographers) is as important to the 'view' as are the one's who stand out in having discovered something in the areas that <em>they</em> probed.</p>

[cyanatic]

<p>Nicely written, and an interesting view, Julie. </p>

[clive_murray_white]

<p>I've been a lurker on this thread, not quite being able to put my finger on my real opinions about the topic and by chance a friend posted a Paul Himmel Grand Central Station picture on Facebook <a href="http://photoplay.livejournal.com/452951.html">http://photoplay.livejournal.com/452951.htm</a> that I hadn't seen before so it was new to me 67 years after it was actually made.</p>

<p>The picture itself also encapsulates a broader view of my feeling about this topic in that era in which it was taken is secondary to the photographic intention which, in my opinion, is as new today as it was when it was taken. </p>

[cyanatic]

<p>Clive -- Thanks for sharing that link. I haven't looked at that much of Himmel's work so it was interesting to view. </p>

[clive_murray_white]

<p>I came across this a few moments ago - seems pertinent to our discussion.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.nowness.com/day/2013/9/7/3316/the-8mm-films-of-vivian-maier">http://www.nowness.com/day/2013/9/7/3316/the-8mm-films-of-vivian-maier</a></p>