urban ku # 97 ~ what? # 4
Tuesday, August 21, 2007 at 10:15AM 
Tugging a boat on the beach • click to embiggenIt seems as though some have assumed, because I believe that the medium of photography is inexorably linked to the real, that I have somehow dismissed the fact that photographs cannot 'transcend their subject matter'.
Nothing could be more wrong. Anyone who has followed The Landscapist for any length of time knows that I believe the best photographs are those which illustrate and illuminate, denote and connote, have studium and punctum.
For that matter, just read the blog title subhead - photography that pricks the unthought known.
Acknowledging that the medium of photography is inexorably linked to the real in no way limits its ability to transcend the visual literalness of any given picture's referent for, as Graham Clarke writes in The Photograph;
"The most obvious of photographs is fraught with complications and contradictions, and we can analyse and read it in a way that takes account of these. For all its acknowledged literalness, the photographic image retains a dense and, in many ways, wonderous capacity to mean ... Merely by announcing its subject, the photograph grants both meaning and significance. The banal, the marginal, the momentary are given status withing an assumed cultural register ... it can make anything important. It has the capacity to move between extremes - philosophical, cultural, social. The pphotograph is free of limits, just as its subject matter is infinite. The 'moment' is thus its greatest asset, for the 'moment' is always unique, and it is the moment that the photograph brings into focus."
And, it is that moment which is inexorably linked with the real.
Reader Comments (2)
This picture really caused me to have a stong emotional reaction - I actually cried. I would name it something like beach goodbye 1967-2047. The long shadows make me feel the temperature of the end of a hot sunny day, when i am damp and cool from the last swim of the week. In 1967, i was the little kid in the foreground running with the boat, and the adults who were in the background saying goodbye for anther year in 1967 are mostly gone now. In 1980 I would have been one of the younger people on the perifery, headed to somewhere with more action. Now, I am one of the adults, saying goodbye to cousins and siblings, knowing how much will happen in the twelve months before we are on the beach saying goodbye again (already members of my generation are starting to go).
I don't know how much of this is my experience, vs how much the "stranger" to the scene would see.
PS The husband and I never discussed this - it is ironic that he chose a pic i don't even think i saw to illustrate the duality of what photos do or are or whatever
Well, when I first viewed this image earlier today I've gotta say that I also had a very visceral reaction. I don't know what causes me to respond more, the child on the periphery pulling his boat in the sand (hugo?) or the cluster of "adults" in what appears to be the last throngs of conversation. So many visual and emotional familiarities here and I don't know any of these people or anything about the place. I might even go out on a limb and say that this is the most powerful image I've ever seen from you Mark. There's one world here that seems to be spinning in two completely different orbits. Illustrate, illuminate, denote, connote, studium, punctum---this is the whole enchilada in my opinion.