ku # 632-41 ~ a damn good question
Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 06:01PM 
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Rainy day # 10 • click to embiggenCoincidental to an recent ongoing rumination I have been engaged in, Matt Dallos asked on man & nature # 252:
Have there been times when photography has failed you? .... in that you had something inside that you desperately needed to express or share and it couldn't be done with a photo. I guess I'm asking are there ideas/thoughts that haunt you that you cannot translate into photographs?
On one level, the easy answer is simply - no, never. On that level, since I rarely set out with any ideas/thoughts that I want to translate into pictures other than my standard desire to picture what I see - especially the beauty in the commonplace, I am rarely disappointed in the results. I have no trouble at all translating ideas/thoughts into pictures, which is distinctly different from the fact that I do have ideas/thoughts that I want to translate into pictures but simply have not attempted to do so and that fact does, indeed, haunt me.
That said, consider the 10 pictures that are part of this entry. I was out and about on a particular non-picturing mission. It was raining cats and dogs and we were in the very last stage of autumn foliage, a time that appeals to my eye and sensibilities. There were lots of dead leaves, half bare trees, and a thick rainy mist - one of my absolute favorite times / favorite weather conditions of the year.
Within a very short time, 20 minutes at the most, I made the 10 pictures that you see here and I am very pleased with the results. There is not a single picture that I would not be very happy to hang on my wall. And I have to say that this is a very typical picturing experience for me. In fact, if the wife and I were not not on a specific mission, I could have made 30-40 pictures to include a fair number of man & nature pictures as well.
However, that said, my recent ongoing rumination is concerned with just that issue. I really do not believe that my "standards" for what constitutes a very good picture (talking about my pictures here) are that low. At the risk of sounding immodest, I am very good at what I do.
Over the past 10 years or so I have made thousands of very good pictures - approximately 1,500 of which have been posted here on The Landscapist over the past 3 years . Sure enough, if I did a particularly critical edit, I might end up with "only" 500 or so "ultra-keepers" but that's still a lot of pictures.
So, on another level - that of sharing my ideas/thoughts - that's precisely, rumination-wise, where I do fear that either photography has failed me, or, quite possibly, that I have failed photography. In either case I am simply overwhelmed by the number of pictures. It seems at times that I have constructed a photographic Tower of Babel, too many voices all speaking at the same time. The result being that, perhaps, my ideas/thoughts are; 1) not clear, 2) too diluted, 3)too fragmented, 4) too weakened by too much information.
All those pictures can convey a sense of lack of focus in the work- and I'm not talking about my new 25mm f2.8 shallow DOF pictures.
That said, nearly 2 years ago I had hit upon the idea of discursive promiscuity as a viable approach to this "dilemma". To repeat my rationale for a discursive promiscuity presentation:
The conceptual point of the project / exhibit is multifaceted. Some, but by no means all, of the topics I wish to address are (in no particular order at this time):
1. The discursive and promiscuous nature of the medium of photography
2. The discursive and promiscuous nature of my body of work
3. The apparent casualness / randomness of my individual images v. the apparent casual / random arrangement in their presentation
4. Does the ease of digital capture and the resultant volume of images tell us more or less about the world we inhabit?
5. Complexity and chaos
6. The medium's narrative possibilities
7. Information saturation in a information media saturated culture
8. My discursive and promiscuous view of the Adirondacks v. the eco-porn calendar view
9. Fact v. fiction
10. The nature of beauty
11. Why I just flat out like saying the phrase "Discursive Promiscuity"
The longer I have ruminated about this, the more I am inclined to go for it. At the very least, making the effort to pull this together will ameliorate my feelings of / doubts about failure.
BTW, I mentioned that Matt's question was a damn good one. Even though the question was intended for me, feel free to give an answer here for yourself - and that includes Matt - has photography ever failed you?
Reader Comments (3)
Thanks for the in depth response, Mark.
Yes, it has failed me. Though I have to wonder if maybe I failed it. I'm going to have a hard time explaining that, but I'll try.
I have just run into too many situations in the past 12-18 months when what I was seeing in the world and what I wanted to show about the world just couldn't be done with photography. I needed to be able to show a passage of time, or some background, or something that wasn't visual. Part of it, I think, is that because the meaning in a photograph is so ambiguous that you have to rely on others to interrupt the meaning. Sometimes that is a great asset, but sometimes it is limiting.
An example might help: Have you ever read Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez? It is such a wonderful discussion of so many varied topics all centered around his explorations of the Arctic. But so much of what he says is so esoteric that if he were trying to present those ideas in photographs the depth would be lost. I can just see a book full of his photographs that would be reduced to beautiful but shallow photographs because the meaning that he was seeing was stripped away. This can be repeated for a whole string of authors: Abbey, Stegner, McPhee, Chatwin, maybe even Melville and Thoreau.
With that being said, I have found a new place for photography. It will become my poetry, showing what cannot and should not be explained. On top of that I need something else. Your guess is as good as mine as to what that might be.
I tried very hard to become a musician/composer in my early twenties, but gave it up when I realised only photograpy could express what was on my mind. Music failed me, photography hasn't, yet.
Regardless of being frustrated over one form of expression or another, here's the best thing: It doesn't really matter. I feel that what is important is your worldview, your thoughts, your feelings. Expression comes down to picking what method works the best and then mastering that. Compared to educating and pushing yourself to develop your take on things, learning how to photograph or how to write or how to make music are exercises in technique.