What difference does it make if you really know your subject?

[Julie H]

If you felt uncomfortable

<br><br>

I feel wonderful. Everything is beautiful.

[Norman 202]

I feel wonderful. Everything is beautiful

and then you sobered up, eh? :)

[Julie H]

No.<br><br>

Do I have to spell it out? What I mean is that I can't make valid judgments ("feel uncomfortable") about someone I know next to nothing about.

<br><br>

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

<br><br>

 

How can I tell you<br>

how I need our bitter<br>

weary chance meeting of life?<br>

— first verse of How by S.J. Marks

[sjmurray]

There is no "right/wrong, true/false" ever. I don't think. There's only a moment captured. It could mean anything and it all depends on what it says to the viewer. It doesn't matter at all what you think when you take the photograph. You really never really know what's going on with the subject. Its all guesswork anyway. The image will have a life of its own.

[Norma Desmond]

I tend to take a fair amount of responsibility both for the work I produce and for viewers' reactions to it. That doesn't mean that viewers won't take off in their own directions and bring personal experience to the photo. But I definitely don't think it's all up to the viewer. For me, it's very much about the subject and very much about the photographer. I hope that my work bears some of me in it and that that actually has some effect on the viewer. I see the ways in which, as a general rule, viewers respond to photos of, say, Andy, as opposed to photos of Ian. The subject matters and seems to me to have a lot of input into viewer reactions. While viewers will, of course, each react in their own subjective way, I tend to notice there is often a common thread of reaction to each photo. I think of myself as being in a relationship with both the subject and the viewer, and I think viewer and subject are in a relationship as well. That's a kind of layering I revel in.

<br><br>

I do make judgments about how I'm photographically treating subjects I know well and subjects I've just met. Naturally, I can rely a bit more on the judgments I make relative to the people I know but, because I think of myself as part of a culture and society, I generally have a good feel for what others may appreciate in a portrait of themselves and what they won't. Sometimes, I think of it as my job to expand their vision of themselves, show them a side they may not have seen before, "flatter" them with a twist rather than an expectation. If they hate it, I put it away.

<br><br>

I enjoy photographing people I know well and people I've just met. Yes, there are differences, but I like exploring the potential of each.

<br><br>

I consider it fun to try to reflect or bring out a "truth" about someone I already know. I am also happy to create new "truths" with someone I know . . . find roles for them to play, characters for them to be . . . that still has a distinct reality, IMO. Fiction is made up but it so often has a deep sense of being true on important human levels.

<br><br>

And I think I can reflect "truths" about people I don't know. Maybe the photographic equivalent of love at first sight.

<br><br>

Most portraits and even photos of places and things are about the individual person, place, or thing being photographed and also about something a bit more universal than that. Many good portraits, for example, will capture something special about the person (a person you may not know) and will also capture something very relatable to unfamiliar viewers in terms of the human condition.

[Sandy Vongries]

Factually, the most important thing familiarity can deliver to a photographer is the ability to portray subjects as they perceive themselves, or would like to imagine themselves. Portrait photogs who can reliably suss that out prosper.

[Julie H]

Pictures that don't make me uncomfortable don't particularly interest me.<br><br>

I want to photograph what makes me uncomfortable.<br><br>

I want to look at photographs that make me uncomfortable.<br><br>

But I want my discomfort to be justified.<br><br>

In my opinion, the very best photography, the best art of any kind, makes me uncomfortable in some way. It's the best because it makes me uncomfortable.<br><br>

In my opinion, the worst photography and the worst art also makes me uncomfortable in some way.<br><br>

The difference between the discomfort of the best and the discomfort of the worst, in my opinion, is that the discomfort of the best is justified; the worst is not.<br><br>

Justification requires knowing my discomfort.<br><br>

Discomfort that engages, does not settle, lasts and affects me is because the artist showed me what he knew and no more. I may get many things from the picture that the artist did not, but what we will have in common is that discomfort, that disturbance, that urgency of uncertainty.<br><br>

Discomfort that is shown out of drive-by ignorance, or from the blindness of settled prejudice, or simply gratuitous button-pushing by the picture-maker is crummy at best and disgraceful and damaging at worst.<br><br>

The key, for me, is that bolded word, justified. For example, Robert Frank wasn't familiar with, didn't "really know" the people in his pictures but he did "really know" his own discomfort, and I think he immersed himself in it, followed it like a bloodhound, for the duration of his American's project. You may find Ansel Adams's landscapes completely comfortable; I don't. His best, for me, contain a thread of terror (or maybe a nicer arty word, the 'sublime'). There's always something stony, too black, a dread power in his best work. Sort of like the inverse of a thunderstorm which is lots of terror with a thread of magnificent glory in it. Discomfort. His 'prettier' landscapes don't stay with me.

<br><br>

Comfortable pictures don't really interest me. They're pleasant. They are good exercises for the eye. They don't last, IMO.<br><br>

Please note: I apologize for the terseness and sharpness of this post. I'm in a tearing hurry first thing this AM and just wanted to get the above added to the discussion. Please add suitable amounts of butter to make it less pedantic and more conversational. Thanks!

[Norma Desmond]

I tend to be more open to a variety of art experiences. Some of it makes me uncomfortable. Some of it makes me quite comfortable. Comfort or its lack would not be where I'd go in describing my own art experiences. The difference between the bombast of the first movement of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto and the lyricism of the second movement. The difference between a Fritz Lang German Expressionist mind-twister and a George Stevens romantic comedy. The difference between a Nan Goldin photo of her own abuse and a Meyerowitz scene of the cape. The cape doesn't make me uncomfortable . . . and it's still very much art. For me, art is so many things that to chain it down with a single adjective just could never work.

[Norma Desmond]

In any case, I thought we were talking about our relationships to our photographic subjects, not necessarily art, for a change.

[Allen Herbert]

"difference does it make if you really know your subject?"

 

Methinks really knowing your subject can give you a clouded vision. Perhaps not knowing the subject might give you a better understanding...but then you might have to challenge to to look for a deeper insight.

[Julie H]

Meyerowitz's large format work makes me powerfully uncomfortable in the same way as an unbodied scent or perfume disturbs me.<br><br>

 

... being-lost ...

<br><br>

"you have to hurry if you want to see something, everything is disappearing." — Cézanne

<br><br>

Never to see ghosts? Then to be<br>

haunted by what is, only — to believe that glass<br>

is for looking through, that rooms, too, can be empty,<br>

the past past, deeds done,<br>

that sleep, however troubled, is your own?<br>

Do the dead lie down, then? Are blind men blind?<br>

Is love in touch alone? Do lights go out?<br>

— first verse of Ghosts by Alastair Reid

[Norma Desmond]

"Ideology has shaped the very sofa on which I sit." —Mason Cooley

[Julie H]

I am describing how I see pictures.

[Norma Desmond]

And in doing so, you seem to be forcing Meyerowitz into a belief cage about what art is. Regarding what you've said here, I'm not sure whether you're looking at pictures or insisting that all pictures somehow support your belief, regardless of the contortions made to do so.

[Julie H]

I am not forcing or insisting that anybody to do anything. I am describing how I see pictures.

[Julie H]

So it seems you have grown comfortable with the uncomfortable and have grown uncomfortable with the too comfortable.

<br><br>

Heh. Cool idea ... but ... uncomfortable can't be comfortable and comfortable can't be un-comfortable. Each is defined by the absence of the other. Also, I don't think I have any objection to the "too comfortable." Au contraire, I very much like my comforts. Art disrupts me. I love it and hate it. Here is the poet Marianne Moore saying it better than I can:

<br><br>

"Somebody asked me if I was going to say something about why I dislike poetry. I say it with all my heart: I fear and dread it, and we are estranged from it by much that passes as virtuosity — that is affectation or exhibitionism — and then talent comes to the rescue, and we forget about what we think and automatically we are helplessly interested."

[Norma Desmond]

It may be the case that one can't be comfortable with the uncomfortable and one can't be uncomfortable with the comfortable though, like Phil, I would challenge this as well, but I think the case we have here is slightly different and it's worth noting that one can be quite comfortable with the IDEA of being uncomfortable.

[Julie H]

Why else would we want to get into a state of being lost if it wasn't for the innate drive to continually find ourselves ( our self ) again? The known and the unknown are only meaningful when both exist in relation to each other instead of being defined by each other's absence.

<br><br>

I assume you are describing yourself. Can you be more specific?

<br><br>

Note that "being-lost" is not wanting to "be lost"; rather it's about what's constantly being lost, what's always being lost. Regret, not wanting. The picture is a cenotaph.

[Julie H]

We'll get in BIG trouble if we get too abstract, Phil, but I post this, below, for you, anyway:

<br><br>

"… When you slip, you lose control but not your centre of gravity, which continues to answer to the slip." — Richard Shiff describing de Kooning's MO

[Norman 202]

 

 

xxx

[Julie H]

Bezsonnitza tvoy vzor oonyl i strashen;<br>

lubov moya, otstoopnika prostee. — Vladimir Nabokov

[Uhooru]

Its a fair question Julie I think. Personally, I take a lot of photos of very close friends and generally the Irish music scene in California. These are mostly people I've known for years and it forms a strong community. When photographing my friends, there is an obvious comfort zone, that allows for, when I'm in to taking their pictures, a freedom of shooting relatively what I please without fear of overly upsetting anyone and I can get the flow of the time spent and hopefully bring viewers into the scene I'm shooting. Shooting candids or on the street, the photograph of people will reflect the kind of connection we make with each other, and whatever other factors in play. Generally, shooting strangers can have more tension to them. However, I've been told by some, that when photographing strangers, they don't "hide" from me. I'm not sure trying to parse out exactly what is happening in any photographic moment is worth the effort because there are too many things happening at too many levels, some conscious, some observant and calculating and some acting out of awareness. I have a sense of what's happening, but am too busy to over think it. The photo itself will reveal some of this, but to stop and think about it while doing it, simply takes ones mind off the process.

[Julie H]

I've been told by some, that when photographing strangers, they don't "hide" from me.

<br><br>

I've seen many written accounts of how people will tell complete strangers things about their lives that they never tell their friends and family. And then tell the listener that they don't know why they're doing it. It seems to happen a lot, maybe on the assumption that the listener won't ever return "into" their life and thus the telling has no consequence? The urge to be heard but not remembered?

[Julie H]

Sally Mann, photographed people she really knew in her project Immediate Family. Here is Reynolds Price writing about his own family photographs and then about Mann's:

<br><br>

"As an only child for my first eight years, I had a more or less full-time job as observer and mental recorder of both the visible and the implicit lives of my tender but life-pressed parents, my big manic-depressive and endlessly narrative extended family, my own young friends — in all of whom I mainly delighted — and of the lives of those few but powerful figures who stood as monsters in the road before me ..."

<br><br>

"Why are none of those long scenarios of pleasure or deprivation detectable, even by me now, in the photographic record of my youth? Why do they wait till I'm well on in late adolescence to show their clues in a few snapshots of a more solemn me — the standard glum and spotty teenager; the fledgling Hamlet, navel-gazing? The quick answer of course is that, at the first glimpse of any emotion but joy or a premature amusing dignity, my parents' camera would refuse to click. A true and more complicated corollary is the fact that, like the great majority of middle-class children, I accepted from the cradle onward a near-perfect complicity in the fiction of our endless contentment with one another and with the world beyond us."

<br><br>

"... I wish my parents and kin had settled for more than well-aimed pictures of my infant states and my slightly older conditioned jokes.

<br><br>

"They exposed yards of film, not only in their frank satisfaction in a child but also in pursuit of visible proof that I was glad to be their product, a moon to their sun — and I generally was — but had a hid dark face, which was where I lived for far more hours — and now for nearly six decades — than any of them would have wanted to hear, not to mention confirm in a permanent image. Like most veterans of family photographs then, my face and body — so far as they manage to outlast me — will survive as a highly edited version of the whole person I managed to be behind an ever-ready grin."

<br><br>

[ ... ]

<br><br>

"... however striking and carefully probing — however tightly laced with the secret dares and trusts that pass unspoken between the eye at the lens and the lighted child just there beyond it — these [sally Mann's] images are collaborations at least as thorough as the common collusion between a parent bent on a bland and carmelized family lie and the giggling party-hatted subject. The hand that triggers the lens in either case — Mann's or the average family doter's — has similar first motives. Primary of course is the urge to save some fleeting reaction, some racing instant of keen-eyed witness to a richness that's longing to lie about its buried face or to hide entirely, though Sally Mann's hand is far more likely than most in the world to wait till the crucial hid emotion, the utterly characteristic thought, moves the child's face from deep inside and flaunts its life for the single instant it trusts the world."

<br><br>

"... To what significant extent are a viewer's feelings about the artist and her subjects altered by the knowledge or an ignorance of the fact that, behind the lens, stands the children's own mother?

<br><br>

"Whatever the viewer's seasoned response when he or she has given these pictures their serious due, for me — as much as any images I know in the crowded history of domestic photography — these loving, fearful, trustworthy and profound pictures explore the nature of family love, maternal love and child response; and they do so from new yet ancient grounds."

[Julie H]

Sally Mann photographed people she didn't really know in her project At Twelve. Here is Ann Beattie writing about that project:

<br><br>

"... It seems to me that here, and elsewhere in Mann's photographs, we are complicitous. We look back to childhood wanting to see aspects of ourselves that we might have forgotten, repressed, or abandoned, yet often what we see is not an ideal childhood, but a world typified by stains on the sheets. The horse's legs were broken, or our faces registered the shadows of broken glass. Or at times, exhilarated, we cast shadows as if, standing at the base of a tree, we stood at the beginning of a rainbow and it rose right out of our heads.

<br><br>

"Sally Mann's photographs don't glamorize the world, but they don't make it into something more unpleasant than it is, either. Childhood and adolescence are resonant, significant, and sometimes symbolic — yet the photographer never gives us the idea that her subjects can be relegated to operatives in some myth that can easily be contained in the moment. In their routines and parodies, they are far more complex."

<br><br>

That doesn't sound entirely different from Price's description of the Immediate Family project. But if you Google the two Mann projects, Immediate Family and At Twelve, I think you will see the kind of qualitative — formal and relational — difference that permeates the pictures. In the first, she shoots from the inside; in the latter, from the outside, even though she took the time to be acquainted with her twelve-year old subjects and their families.