man & nature/civilized ku ~ walking the tightrope of art

Two places in the gloaming - Golf Course, Peru, NY • Old City, Montreal CA. • click to embiggenOn the face of it, this statement from Robert Adams (the other photographer named Adams) seems to suggest that picture making is all about (to paraphrase Winogrand) how the view looks photographed.

One does not for long wrestle a view camera in the wind and heat and cold just to illustrate a philosophy. The thing that keeps you scrambling over the rocks, risking snakes, and swatting at the flies is the view. It is only your enjoyment of and commitment to what you see, not to what you rationally understand, that balances the otherwise absurd investment of labor.

However, if you are familiar with Adams' pictures (click, >Enter>Artists>Robert Adams), you know that he has spent most of his time photography-wise picturing the American West, making pictures in which evidence of the hand of humankind on the landscape is quite apparent. And, if you take the time to read the interview, Photography, Life & Beauty on the above link to Adams on PBS, you will also know / learn that, for Adams, making pictures is much more than just the view.

All of that said, I must confess that I have been pondering these very sentiments of late. To be precise, especially the one about "enjoyment of and commitment to what you see" vs "what you rationally understand:. To wit:

Making a not too big leap of interpretation of Adams words, I take them to mean that he is talking about not only the view itself but also about one's pictures of it. And, without equivocation, I must say that I really enjoy and am committed to those views that I picture and how they look pictured. Especially the how-the-views-look-pictured part - I really like looking at my pictures.

Certainly, my pictures cause me to think and feel - they evince a plethora of emotional and intellectual sensations - "what I rationally understand", AKA, my "philosophy". There is ample evidence that this is also true for others as well, but .... that said, and even though I completely agree with the words of Sir Joshua Reynolds that "A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts", I hang my pictures (and those of others) on my walls because I just flat out like the way they look. To my eye, they exhibit a vision of beauty.

So, in a very real sense, Adams is right - the thing that keeps me coming back (to picture making) is my enjoyment and commitment to what I see. BUT ... this in no way negates the importance, in the making of Art, of "seeing" beyond the surface of things - making pictures that are much more than just something enjoyable to look at.

After all, in the aforementioned Adams' quote, he writes of a "balance" and he makes it very clear that that balance is one between the view and what you rationally understand / a philosophy. Or, in other words, between what the view and what you think and want to say about it.

The Content (the referent) of my pictures may not be of "views" which are considered by traditional criteria to be beautiful, but I believe that I make pictures that evince a beauty of Form - the visual language I use to suggest, communicate, and reinforce an underlying sense of the beauty to found in that which I picture (part of the the implied/inferred meaning of my pictures).

And why make pictures of that which I consider to be beautiful? As Adams states, Beauty "is the confirmation of meaning in life" and that "It’s the traditional end of art", and I completely agree with those sentiments.

That said, I have no interest in making pictures that are "merely" about the beautiful. The world is a much more complex place than that. If photography, Fine Art Division, is to fully engage life and what it means to be human, then it must address that complexity.

And that is why I try to imbue my pictures with a sense of ambiguity and tension.

The hand of humankind that is in evidence in many of my pictures can be viewed from the perspective of its destructive side - it's use as a means to defile and pillage, to create ugliness and degradation to the landscape around us and, hence, foster a feeling of human despair, ennui, and even nihilism. In some cases, this is exactly what I mean to imply.

But, always with the use of a visual language that creates beautiful Form, I also mean to imply/suggest that all is not lost, AKA, Hope - that the hand of humankind can also be used to transform and create beauty and delight, to elevate and inspire, and to grow and renew.

I want the viewers of my pictures to be acutely aware of that dichotomy inherent in the human condition - the possibilities of the creative and the destructive power of humankind.

That's the balancing act that also keeps me coming back to the act of making pictures.

Comments

[Mauro]

Just a doubt. After an afternoon in which I went to a museum (Museo Diocesano in Milan)which was displaying a nice collection of landscape paintings going from Lorrain to Turner and after some readings and thoughts on photography and at the end reading your considerations I am so tired that I am starting to think that at the very end it could be that: "Anything goes" paraphrasing what J. P. Feyerabend said about the way in which scientific discovery was made in "Against the method".

Anyway it is far more relaxing to look at your pictures.

[Mark M]

After all, in the aforementioned Adams' quote, he writes of a "balance" and he makes it very clear that that balance is one between the view and what you rationally understand / a philosophy.

I re-read the quote three more times just to make sure and I can confidently say that the quote above says no such thing.

The balance to which he is referring is that thing that compensates him for the 'absurd investment of labor' which he states explicitly:
...is only your enjoyment of and commitment to what you see, not to what you rationally understand. [emphasis mine]

Perhaps Adams affirms your statement elsewhere. This is the problem with buttressing arguments with quotes; they provide an often false sense of authority, are easy to take out of context, and provide a temptation to project your own ideas onto an author who may not share them. To state unequivocally that Adams supports the idea of balancing between rational philosophy and the more visceral effect of the view will require something other than the above quote. The interviews connected to the link you provided certainly show him willing to talk about art from a philosophical perspective, but that is no indication that this is how he actually goes about making a photograph.

What strikes me most about this and many of the other posts on this blog is the frequent critical approach starting with the idea that beauty does not come from formal rules, but rather it is something that happens in the viewer or somewhere between the artist and the viewer. The idea that all those neoclassicists looking back to Aristotle's Poetics got it wrong, that Pope got it wrong in his lines:

Those rules of old, discover'd, not devised,
Are Nature still, but Nature methodized;

The idea that attempting to formalize beauty with Newtonian precision doesn't lead to anything other than stagnant art is a pet idea of the nineteenth century. I've always found it interesting that despite modernity's howling against romanticism, so many of its foundational ideas come directly from the nineteenth century.

[Mauro]

Mark (M),
a postmodern critic would hate you :-D. But since I do not value that much postmodern theory do not worry. But I will not enter in philosophical considerations. Instead let me digress on statistics. In times of modernism it was easy to discuss upon absolute beauty, Art was a matter of few. In our time, and thanks to photography and diffused, basic, education , a lot of people wants to express themselves, and they do and they have radical different points of view about what is to be considered beauty. So we have as many concepts of beauty as the number of the stars in the sky. The same applies to the way in which Art is made.

But to get out of seriousness maybe Ansel's practical Art making methodology was to drink a couple of bottles of whiskey and then get out in the cold to take pictures. Obviously he could not say such a thing in conference.

As for myself when I speak of viewing I am referring to the perceptive side and it is not applied to the whole process of Art making. As a matter of fact I am convinced that we make pictures not from objects or forms but from our own look (that is pretty platonic :-) and that is the part in which Mark (H) excels.

[Bill Gotz]

Much of what Adams says on the PBS site I relate to. Some times he seem to be putting word to how I'm thinking about my own photographs. I wish I had a verbal mind like Adams to explain my pictures to others, and myself. Maybe someone other than me would find my pictures interesting if I could. And maybe I could write a usable artist statement.

This quote: "It's not exactly the same as life. It's life seen better," seem to touch on why when photographing something "ugly" the photographs often come out beautiful somehow.

[Bill Gotz]

I think almost any landscape picture that uses pretty form refers us on some level to the romantic school of picturing (from the Hudson River School painters to Ansel Adams). When the effect of man in the landscape is included in the landscape a dissonance is sets up that is compelling to the viewer. It's the difference between our romantic ideas and the reality of our world. And it's the tension between the beautiful and the ugly, cultural and/or visual. It's the dissonance that defines modern life. And probably all human life before as well. It's the essence of what to be human, this contrast between beauty and ugliness. I suppose it relates to the struggle of good and evil. It seem to be the struggle of hope and despair, of a reason to go on and a reason to give up. The struggle of being human I suppose. The really great ones, like Robert Adams, make art from this dissonance.

I'm also interested in the power of photographs to transform the viewed. How that which is seen as ugly can gain a beauty when presented as a picture. Where does this beauty come from. I suppose this begins to ask the fundamental question: what is beauty? Maybe the beauty comes from the presentation of something as art. Maybe it comes from the colors and forms of the picture, in other words from the visual language overcoming the subject. Maybe it comes from some inner understanding of a metaphor for the human condition.