Where's your pleasure?

[Norma Desmond]

John, you may be as bold as you like!

 

My quarrel with the quote from Sally is this: I don't think the present is or ever was uncorrupted, so I don't necessarily think memories or photos corrupt something. The present was never a fixed, true thing. It was always moving and always subject to interpretation, perspective, bias, even prejudice. I think photos are a means of bringing something out.

 

When I look at snapshots of my parents during their courtship before WWII, I don't necessarily fool myself into thinking that life was always as rosy as those snapshots paint it. The fact of the matter is, snapshots weren't taken at funerals and fights! And, yet, those snapshots give me a special sort of glimpse into something I might not otherwise have been able to witness as intimately. Even being able to see the way they dressed for certain occasions and the way their dress related to the decor surrounding them does give me a truth about the times, even though it does not give me THE truth. This, to me, is not a corruption.

 

I don't believe photographs "supplant" or are trying to "supplant" the past or our memories. I think they are accompanying and sometimes augmenting them.

[Julie H]

John, did you notice that she was Jonathan Crary's girlfriend at one point? That was such a weird connection for me — I've been reading his stuff for years and there he pops up as a youngster sporting around with Sally Mann. And she with him. Nutty.

[Julie H]

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

This is Sally Mann describing what photography is sometimes like for her. From her book Deep South:

"… From the moment I passed into Mississippi, my time became ecstatic. It is a fact for me that certain moments in the creative process, moments when I am really seeing, become somehow attenuated, weirdly expansive. A radiance coalesces about the landscape, rich in possibility, supercharged with something electric. Time slows down. Time becomes ecstatic.

 

"I once read an account by Hollis Frampton about a man named Breedlove, who broke the world land speed record on the Bonneville Salt Flats. Near the end of his second run, at 620 miles per hour, his car spun out of control, severing telephone poles, flying through the air, and crashing in a salt pond.

 

"Breedlove was unhurt. When asked by a reporter to remark on the incident, he spoke into the microphone for an astonishing hour and thirty-five minutes, during which time he described in a sequential and deliberate way what occurred in a period of 8.7 seconds. In this monologue, Breedlove expressed concern that he would bore his listeners and said he would do his polite best to make a much longer story short. As Frampton points out, this "ecstatic utterance" represents a temporal expansion in the ration of 655 to one."

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

[movingfinger]

John, did you notice that she was Jonathan Crary's girlfriend at one point?

Actually Julie, I've never heard of Jonathan Crary before your post. But with your question I googled him and now I will look at some of his writing.

 

Also thanks for some additional words from Sally Mann. From reading her book Hold Still, I feel a kinship with her given we are the same age, and we both got into photography in our youth via similar channels including a fascination with Steichen's Family of Man. Of course she took her youthful fascination with photography a bit farther than I did :(

[movingfinger]

My quarrel with the quote from Sally is this: I don't think the present is or ever was uncorrupted, so I don't necessarily think memories or photos corrupt something. The present was never a fixed, true thing. It was always moving and always subject to interpretation, perspective, bias, even prejudice. I think photos are a means of bringing something out.

I have no quarrel with what you state. In Sally's defense, and to further illustrate that you and Sally are in synch (at least in my reading of your comments), here is another passage from Hold Still:

How can a sentient person of the modern age mistake photography for reality? All perception is selection, and all photographs – no matter how objectively journalistic the photographer's intent – exclude aspects of the moment's complexity. Photographs economize the truth; they are always moments more or less illusorily abducted from time's continuum.

I see strong similarities between your statement and hers.

[Julie H]

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

John, I have to disagree with the last Mann quote, even though I know what she meant, or at least I'm pretty sure I know what she meant. You give it as:

 

"

Photographs economize the truth

."

 

Photographs don't economize and they don't contain truth. They are just what was in front of the lens. Why be so nit-picky? Because making the mistake of taking *our* perception for what the camera in fact gives us is a fundamental (and hard to resist) mistake of photography. It's very easy for people to assume that their picture of granny contains granny-memories, when all that it contains is an approximation of the light and shadow made by old wrinkly woman. Your granny is not my granny.

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

[Norma Desmond]

Phil, I don’t agree with that characterization of a photo as being forever fixed. All the important photos for me over time have changed dramatically as I view and re-view them. Just as the past is not fixed, photos are not fixed. Photos don’t exist in their own world. They exist within changing contexts and changing understandings of histories.

 

John, I now see more similarity in my views and Mann’s views. This is a danger of selective quotes, so I’m glad you provided more of her thoughts which help clarify what was originally quoted, which had given me a more restricted take on what she was getting at. Thanks.

[Julie H]

photos for me over time have changed dramatically

Nothing in the photos changed.

[Norma Desmond]

John, re-reading the Mann quote you posted where she compares photos and reality, I’m unclear as to her actual take on it. Is she saying photos and reality are the same because both perception and photos necessarily exclude things? Is she saying we shouldn’t mistake a photo for reality? My own view is that photos are reality, just like cars are and theater is. Things we create/fabricate are real. They aren’t always accurate, however, nor should they be. I also think photos can augment as well as economize, so while they may exclude some complexities of the moment they can sometimes, even often and even at the same time, make simple moments more complex.

[Julie H]

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

True story:

 

I have a conservation easement on my land, and periodically the group that owns/manages the easement sends out interns to check and see that I am abiding by the terms of the easement (not cutting down all my trees or subdividing/building, etc.) One year, two young women showed up to do just that and as we stood in my open door filling out the questionnaire on their clipboards, one of them looked behind me, into the house, and noticed a big pile of 16x20 archival print storage boxes I'd just gotten from Light Impressions.

 

"Are you a photographer?" she asked.

"Yes."

"My mother is a photographer."

Oh dear, I thought snobbishly to myself. Some Mom with an instamatic that I'll have to pretend to be interested in.

"Oh really? What's her name?"

"Sally Mann."

 

My mind went completely blank. I knew the name, but it would not compute. Sally Mann? Sally Mann? Sounds familiar, but ... I might as well have been looking at Alice in Wonderland in the flesh standing in my doorway. After a very long pause where my brain, luckily, resumed functioning, I went on to have a lovely conversation with a now-grown-up Virginia Mann.

 

That was real.

[movingfinger]

True story: ......My mind went completely blank. I knew the name, but it would not compute. Sally Mann? Sally Mann? Sounds familiar, but ... I might as well have been looking at Alice in Wonderland in the flesh standing in my doorway. After a very long pause where my brain, luckily, resumed functioning, I went on to have a lovely conversation with a now-grown-up Virginia Mann.

Well that's a cool true story, I'd like to have been there and share in the discussion (or at least eavesdrop on it). Thanks for sharing it.

[movingfinger]

John, re-reading the Mann quote you posted where she compares photos and reality, I’m unclear as to her actual take on it. Is she saying photos and reality are the same because both perception and photos necessarily exclude things? Is she saying we shouldn’t mistake a photo for reality? My own view is that photos are reality, just like cars are and theater is. Things we create/fabricate are real. They aren’t always accurate, however, nor should they be. I also think photos can augment as well as economize, so while they may exclude some complexities of the moment they can sometimes, even often and even at the same time, make simple moments more complex.

Fred: Save for those quotes of Sally that resonated with me when I read them, I won't go further into trying to divine her mind. If she is reading this thread and wants to jump in with her own thoughts that would be most excellent.

 

As for myself, I agree with what you write. Photographs both create their own reality and they reflect some reality that once existed. How these two ingredients meld in any given present time is unique to the eye and mind of each beholder. For sure a photo can make a simple moment more complex. Dare I reference Weston's Pepper #30? A photo can also make a complex moment simpler. Dare I reference Muybridge's galloping horse?

 

One can get tied up in knots (at least I can) in trying to understand 'experience' and 'memory'. The behavioral psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman has done research on the riddle of experience vs memory, specifically as it relates to 'happiness', see his 20 min. TED talk on this topic. Kahneman says we each have an "experiencing self" and a "remembering self". The experiencing self is living in the ever moving present and the remembering self is the sum total of our memories. As it relates to photography one can imagine a bride or groom at a wedding having a wonderful time, the experiencing self is happy. Now the photographs from the wedding, for whatever reason, are not good, they captured unpleasant expressions, invitees who are no longer friends, etc. In later years that bride or groom, based on the photos, can have a terrible memory of the wedding. Their remembering self, reflecting on the same event, is unhappy.

It's not the photograph itself but the subsequent remembering and retrieving of the memory that 'corrupts' memories and overwrites older ones.

Of course, as that bride or groom reflect more upon the wedding day they will most likely also remember the that they did experience a pleasant time, they were experientially happy. So as Phil alludes, and Sally, and Fred and Julie, photographs add to a complex tapestry of experience and memory within each of us. And getting back to Julie's original question, for me it is adding to that tapestry with images captured in my experiences wherein lies my pleasure.

[Julie H]

adding to that tapestry

That's a beautiful image, but I don't agree with it. :)

 

Any 'tapestry' would be in the mind, not in the photograph(s) which are each and every one of them, independent and ... just what they are. And every additional experience, every additional happening of any kind casts backward and remakes the past, as has been noted by Fred. The past is perpetually undone and remade by the present.

Edited October 24, 2017 by Julie H

[Julie H]

I should add that I don't think this is a corruption. I'm with Bergson in thinking that the present simply (re)makes the past. I (my perception, my memory) was neither mistaken then nor am I mistaken 'now.' It is made anew.

[Supriyo]

We create our own reality through our senses. A blind man's reality would be different from someone who can see. Even those who have all their senses intact take the common view of the world as the truth, but it's our subjective reality (although such reality has many common aspects for all of us). An object that appears to us as chair can appear as a rugged landscape with valleys and gorges to a microorganism. Therefore, I don't like to think of photos as mimicking reality, because there isn't any absolute reality in my opinion. All we can vouch for is our own experience and perception, and thats our reality. In that sense, a photo is a 2 dimensional reality made out of elements of the surrounding world.

[Julie H]

absolute reality in my opinion.

Just so we don't have to do the "what is reality?" thing again, can you agree that if something has a causal affect/effect of any kind on your mind, it's real ... for our purposes? Else how could it be a cause?

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

[Supriyo]

Right, but I think that something probably needs to be outside or independent of our conscious minds. Otherwise, our imaginations will also need to be considered as reality, since they affect us.

[Norma Desmond]

Nothing in the photos changed.

A technical point that makes no difference to what I'm talking about. If they've changed in my eyes, because context changes and perceptions change, I don't care where one chooses to locate that change, which would be an academic point but not one that would affect my understanding of this discussion.

 

Photos do change physically. They fade, they yellow, the colors change over time.

[Julie H]

photographs add to a complex tapestry of experience and memory within each of us. And getting back to Julie's original question, for me it is adding to that tapestry with images captured in my experiences wherein lies my pleasure.

I've already disagreed with the idea of photographs as tapestry, but I want to steal John's lovely word "tapestry" and apply it not to photographs, but to the act of photographing — which, after all, is one of the main places "where" a photographer (us!) finds pleasure (the topic of this thread).

 

I'm going to use quotes from Susan Meiselas in her new book On the Frontline to explore the tapestry within which the act of photography takes place:

 

"There is always the challenge of access, but then the question, what are you doing here? What do you bring? What do you contribute, and for whom?"

 

"I don't see myself as an artist just working within a community of artists. I am most interested in the community from which the work actually comes. I resist the label of 'photojournalism,' which puts one's work into a box."

 

[ ... ]

 

"I didn't know who was in the house [from her project

Porch Portraits

] or what was ahead. You have to trust that curiosity to drive down a road, and not know where it's going to lead you.

 

"I was alone in these settings. There was no writer working with me to provide the context. No James Agee. It's just me and them. The photographs went nowhere except back to the people I photographed. I went home and printed and then posted them the picture, which felt like completing the circle. ... Again the question was who is this work for? There is the gifting back in exchange for the giving of a moment of someone's time. There's a little signal that it's OK to be there and to look. It's a subtle communication. You catch it in their eyes or even in their lack of connection. It's just 'she's here' and 'we're here' and whatever is happening is happening. This is the opposite of the performance of a portrait."

 

This next is about her work done at the S&M club, Pandora's Box, in New York City:

 

"I knew about the larger life they were part of and the invisible subculture that surrounded them, but I made a choice not to get lost in that world. It felt like a place I was not sure I wanted to go. Despite the sense of being on the edge, Pandora's Box was still a safe confined space and I knew the boundaries. The underground slave culture is amorphous and terrifyingly real. Its current could drag you under. There is a subtle process here: you allow yourself to immerse and then you have to pull out. It's also true in historical terms that you go down some temporal river and then you have to reach the bank, but the river flows on. Knowing when to get out takes judgment and I think it is intuitive. Sometimes you feel some sense of incompleteness as opposed to a sense of the circle or the cycle of return.

 

"Why are circles special? We are in these triangular relationships, with photographers, subjects and viewers each having pointed and distinct perspectives. The circle is unifying. Everyone is equidistant from the center. The circle is equalizing. At the heart of it is an implicit collaboration. We are all here, looking at each other.

 

"The frontline is not just a geographical space, it is a cultural boundary, a social edge, a point of interface with time, a deep psychological frontier. The documentary photographer can cross the line and show that the conflict zone is not just a battleground in a distant land; it is also in our homes, it is self-inflicted, it is in our heads."

 

I think there is so much to think about in that last segment, those last three paragraphs, I will leave them without comment so you won't be tilted by my own feelings about what she has written.

 

[Thank you John, for pushing me to think about all kinds of "tapestry."]

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

[movingfinger]

I've already disagreed with the idea of photographs as tapestry

Note that in my earlier posting, where 'tapestry' made its appearance I said

photographs add to a complex tapestry of experience and memory within each of us.

I did not say the photographs were a tapestry, because like you I don't think they are. It is we, in our minds with our experiences, memories, and individual realities that are the tapestry. Doing a quick search on the definition of tapestry gave this

used in reference to an intricate or complex combination of things or sequence of events

This is what I had in mind as a word to describe each person as an individual, and as I said photographs are one and only one facet of that complex combination of things that contribute to make us who and what we are.

[Julie H]

This is what I had in mind as a word to describe each person as an individual, and as I said photographs are one and only one facet of that complex combination of things that contribute to make us who and what we are.

I'm having a hard time pinning down why that still feels wrong for me. I think it's because photographs — the completed image — is as often to do with un-making a mind as to do with making it. A photograph can be a disturbance, and irritation, a shred-ripper. The response to such a picture can be anything from being illuminated, remade in agreement, to anger and refusal (refusal followed by repair/strengthening of what was there before; a conservative response) of that which was disturbed.

 

Tapestry is a noun and that seems too determined.

[Julie H]

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

It occurs to me that I may have confounded some of you by first associating 'tapestry' with the act of photography and then, in my most recent post, insisting that 'tapestry' is a noun. Let me explain:

 

In the Susan Meiselas, 'photography as an act' post, I was thinking about the conventions of photography; the stage, the framework, the way that photographing is woven into society.

 

For example, think of how lawyering is woven into society, or doctoring is woven into society, or carpentering is woven into society. Each of those acts does certain things in certain ways for and with certain supporting social structures to provide certain social needs.

 

What are the conventions of photographing that weave it into society? That's what I was thinking about with the Meiselas quotes.

 

None of that, for lawyer, doctor, carpenter or photographer, is about what any particular individual actually does. It's about a stable (more or less) set of conventions within which and for which one is able to work.

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

[Norma Desmond]

I always thought Carole King used tapestry more as a verb, even though it was technically a noun.

 

"

[Supriyo]

Now we know Phil's secret passion, shooting (and petting) baby animals :)

[Julie H]

..........

BABY ANIMALS

" … 'In the pictures of the old masters,' Max Picard wrote in

The World of Silence

, 'people seem as though they had just come out of the opening in a wall; as if they had wriggled their way out with difficulty. They seem unsafe and hesitant because they have come out too far and still belong more to silence than themselves.' "

 

[ … ]

 

" … Now it is a city hospital on a Monday morning. This is the obstetrical ward. The doctors and nurses wear scrubs of red, blue or green, and white running shoes. They are, according to the tags clipped to their pockets, obstetricians, gynecologists, pediatricians, pediatric nurse practitioners, and pediatric RNs. They consult one another on the hoof. They carry clipboards and vanish down corridors. They push numbered buttons on wall plaques, and doors open.

 

"There might well be a rough angel guarding this ward, or a dragon, or an upwelling current that dashes boats on rocks. There might well be an old stone cairn in the hall by the elevators, or a well, or a ruined shrine wall where people still hear bells. Should we not remove our shoes, drink potions, take baths? For this is surely the wildest deep-sea vent on earth: This is where the people come out." —

Annie Dillard

 

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