ku # 540 ~ in the garden of the world of appearances
Tuesday, December 9, 2008 at 09:34AM 
Interrelated complexity • click to embiggenOk, I get it. No one wants to contemplate the notion of responsibility in picture making. So let me try to address it in another way.
We are living in, as they say, interesting times. I would opine that here in the US of A we are living in kind of end times - at least as far as the notion of super-capitalism is concerned. And, as many have come to learn the hard way, an economy fueled by super capitalism is self-cannibalizing - it not only eats its young, it consumes anything and everything in its path leaving only a gouged-out husk in its wake.
To use a metaphor that would make Chancey Gardener (go to 1:05 for my point) proud, it seems that the once healthy tree that was life in these here United States has had the life strangled out of it by a creeping vine of consumption. In order to save the tree much careful pruning and nurturing is required. We are in need of a very talented, resourceful, and, most importantly, a very creative gardener-in-chief and an actively engaged body of creative cohorts.
Maybe you don't see it that way but that's how I see it. Maybe you think the thing to do is to just coast along the fringes and see what happens. Just put on a smiley face and hope for the best.
In any event, if you consider yourself to be in the camp of actively engaged assistant gardeners who can also make pictures, what kind of pictures do you think should be made in these interesting times?
I used to think that photographs were "composed." This made photography sound very unexuberant, as if it was primarily a deliberate act. Such a notion suggests that a photographer stands in front of an inviting landscape, arranges a composition, and then takes the picture. And it's true that many photographers work that way. Of course, if photographs can be composed, then there must be rules of composition, such as: the subject should never be dead center. But why not? I used to think you could learn how to be a photographer by learning the rules of composition and how to use a camera. Now I think just the opposite: if you have to learn rules, then it's already too late. The elements of a design can make a photograph bearable and inoffensive, but they will not make a photograph compelling. We are compelled by photographs which, within the limits of an objectively appropriate form, manage to offer us something that touches on authentic concerns - our happiness or unhappiness, our fidelities, our modern war with perplexity. The balance between design and content must be there because design by itself is not interesting and pure content is merely assertive. - John Rosenthal
Reader Comments (4)
I did not enter the discussion since it is as much chaotic as in the picture subject of today.
I think that we live in a world that is suffocated by symbolisms, something pretty much similar to the medieval times. Consider just this: how many people have a look at what is out of the windshield every morning commuting to work ? For look I mean paying at least visual attention. maybe a lot of those ones are even environment aware. Not the less they are still using a car with a lot of good reasons. Nobody seems to pay attention to reality, or better their reality is a highly complex product molded by the media. Each time it snows or a dog barks it is a catastrophe (once it used only to snow and dogs used to be best man's friends even if a bit noisy). The reason for this is that we need to avoid the facing of the monstrous lies we are repeating ourselves every moment.
But back to photography ? Who is to blame if the West is thought (worldwide) to be a bunch of photogenic red rocks or wide spaces in which the buffalo runs. Photographers or the ones who used and circulated such images over other ones ? Or what about Yosemite being made exclusively of El Capitano rock and a little more ? Does it matter that it burned down for a large part ? Is Ansel to be blamed for that (not the burning) ? The problem is that he even was sure about his good intentions. And at least does it matter ? yes and no. Yes cause if one continues to lie at the end he lies even to himself. No, for what is the difference if there are also some photographically hidden parking lots ?
Or are photographers happily printing away nature illuminations with a highly polluting set of inks to be blamed :-D for their intentions ? Or ecologist trying to conserve but at the same time mummifying life itself ?
Or the ones in Magnum taking pictures of jinxed (hope it works as in Italian "sfigati") ones to gain a (low) wage in the name of information about the evil things in this world but at the same time perpetuating the condition (at least symbolically) of their photographic subjects of election. And at the end hoping for a new catastrophe to pay the mortgage of their photo machinery, houses and Hummers. Are them to be blamed or it is us, happy fat whites (in the broader sens of being in the richest part of the world and that includes all colors), that buy in either for humanitarian sense either for having the feel that somebody is living worser than us ?
But worser who is to blame if one buys a $8000 camera for saving some workplace in the factories in Vietnam and uses that camera to take pictures of an African village that could survive at least 12 months with that amount ? Or buys a new car to go in new highways all build in the name of ecology and economic growth ?
Hope that this explains my difficulty in giving some kind of reply to your request.
For a moment I had a high hope that this economic come down could lend us (happy fat whites) to a more "frugale" way of living. From yours president plan I do not see this. More I do not think that it is still possible to reason on a national basis. But at the same time a see no way out of this given the need to understand complexity while every body is looking for simple answers like if everything could be B&W. And also because being a happy fat white is quite comfortable :-).
Just to not feel guilty I like to think that making my own tries to inject some sens of reality here and there could be of some use. But at the end I fear to be, once again, lying to myself since my reality is anymore absolute but it emerges from a projection of myself (fears and hopes).
May my God (at least one of them) forgive me for my word pollution and bless you all.
I don't understand. Please elaborate.
Bill, not an easy task.
The way in which we, humans, see the world around us is guided by our knowledge of it. Visual knowledge is what concerns us more as photographers.
If photography is a cohort of reality than it is a way in which our knowledge is connected to the real, lets call it a visual model of the real. A model is always a selection of what is to be considered relevant for the task.
Now if all models of the "real west" only focus on red rocks here we go. It is in the process of selection that the lie could get in, by operating on the selection. But this it is not enough.
To have a model accepted by a large number of humans you need to have some kind of authority that validates it or have it to be the only model circulating. Geographic Magazines, tourist guides, Fine Art photography, Real estate brochures and Movies are all authoritative entities in such regard.
But photography does not only operate in selection it also operates by numbers and repetition. So repeating the same image model a number of times, from different view points, you will obtain some kind of imprinting and reification of the model.
If you ask what is the "American west" to an Italian who's never been there he will always describe something like the monument valley (a bunch of red rocks as I called it quite disrespectfully) or in a lot of cases "Las Vegas" (mostly it depends on how much he/she likes western movies).
Now the pictures made by photographers focusing on those red rocks somehow molded the perception of the west. But "Your West, the American one" certainly is not made only of red rocks. The one presented by R. Adams is more a kind of a suburban wasteland. Both, the "luminous" landscape of red rocks and the suburban wasteland, are models of a perceptual reality. Which one is true ? And trusting a model against the other what do we get ? Well if we go with the "luminous" one things get pretty simple: eternal beauty and poetry, a dead end from my point of view. If we go with the other one things get a bit more complicated and open to debate about the way in which we live and what relation we have with our world.
But the model of R. Adams has to be validated as well, and it is as much a partial view (being a model). Here is where my doubt comes in.
Here is where my doubt comes in. Who is to blame ? The photographer or the agency or we, consumers of the model ?
Hope that this clears a bit more my previous set of rants.
As a last example consider the case of the last summer happened . Several tourists from around the world went to Tivoli (Italy) to have a look of "Villa Adriano". Most of them got pretty angry given that they did not find what was expected as seen in the tourist guides. The Villa is certainly beautiful. But it is, now, surround by industrial plants. They found something that is certainly not as depicted by the pictures. How do you call this ? And how much is responsible the photographer who has taken the pictures in a way to exclude the industrial plants surrounding it. Here is my doubt again. Is the Photographer the only responsible or also the ones who believed that the monument could exist without a surrounding ?
…and the world breathes a sigh of relief that Rosenthal went into photography rather than logic so we don't need to parse the above quote as a statement on the merits of Boethius' Thesis and Connexive logic.
Seriously though, I think the only way this can be true is if you allow a very strict and inflexible definition of composition. If you define composition simply as exerting an organizational intelligence on the material within the border of the photograph than it doesn't follow that there must be rules. At most it implies some vague principles, which would be best left to those investigating information theory, randomness, and entropy. A photo that puts the subject squarely in the middle is still composed.
Speaking of organizational intelligence, we can only hope that the gardener in chief will find people and methods that can impose intelligence and sustainable structure on the proposed infrastructure projects he wants to adopt. I'm tired of living in cities where it is almost impossible to be a pedestrian because city planners neglected sidewalks and where if want to stay in shape you need to drive to the gym because you can't safely get there on foot. It would be nice if we could find a few urban planning geniuses who would like to go back to the drawing board and take advantage of the newly found political will for change.