man & nature # 252 ~ why? I chime in
Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 10:13AM 
A pleasant late autumn afternoon • click to embiggenOK, I guess it would be rather unfair of me to have asked all of you to answer the question proferred in ku # 631 ~ chime in - why do you work in photography and how do the particular qualities of the medium affect your artistic decisions? - and not answer the question myself. So, I'll give it a try.
Without a doubt, I'll assume like many of you who did not responded (at least not yet), I am a bit tongue-tied and brain-seized-up by the question. At first blush, I am a bit stumped. It's not an easy question - I kind of find it akin to the notion of standing in front of the great adjudicator on judgement day and he/she/it says, "Explain yourself. You've got 5 minutes or I open the trap door".
I have to admit that the hair on the back of my neck stands up, my scrotum sack shrivels up and recedes into my abdomen, and that particularly stinky sweat that comes with being nervous starts to leak out of every pore on my body at the thought of that prospect. And of late, the idea of "explaining myself", re: my picturing seems like a similar and daunting gauntlet of agonizing self-examination prospects.
In any event, some background about the "why" part -
I was talking to Jimmi Nuffin - he's regular visitor to / sometimes commenter on The Landscapist and a longtime friend - on the phone yesterday and I mentioned to him that the wife and I were going to Montreal for the weekend. His immediate response was, "Take some pictures", which was more than a little bit like saying. "Don't forget to breathe." Hell, even my 5 year old grandson asked me over a year ago, "Grandpa, why do take so many pictures?"
I mean, for me, making pictures is like breathing - I do it all the time. Literally, I can not remember leaving the house at any time in the last 10 years without at least 1 camera - most often 2 and a camera bag - draped on my body. Really, not once. And rare is the occasion that I do not make pictures, quite often many pictures, when I leave the house. In fact, as if that weren't enough, at night I often dream about making pictures.
I have been making pictures with a serious intent as far back in my life as I can remember. Until I discovered photography (as a thing to delve into with abandon) at the not-so-tender age of 18, all of my picturing making was with pen and pencil - most deliberately not with brush and paint. This activity was aided and abetted by my parents (and teachers) who enrolled me in art classes at the local art museum starting at around 10 years of age.
Drawing pictures was never thrust upon me by my parents. The need to make pictures - as far as I can determine, a preternatural predilection - was always there. They merely gave me the opportunity and freedom to explore it. And explore it I did.
But, here's the odd thing about that - never once was it suggested by my parents, by my teachers, by my academic advisors that I pursue picture making (of any kind) as a career path. Nevertheless, I was making pictures, photography-wise, for a living (and have been ever since) by the time I was 19, albeit initially as a US Army photography specialist.
All of that said, I can state that I work in photography because, for as long as I can remember, I see pictures everywhere. From the time I wake up, to the time I go to bed. Light, shapes, colors, and the relationships thereof jump out the world that see around me like raindrops failing from the sky. They drum on my visual apparatus and consciousness like those same raindrops do on a tin roof.
So, it might follow that I work in photography just to try and figure out for myself what the hell all that drumming is about. However, I'm here to tell you that, after a lifetime of making pictures, hundreds of thousands of pictures, I am no closer to figuring that out than I was when I started. It is, just simply, how I "see".
And I respond to that way of seeing by making pictures. I suspect that if I did not do so, I might go mad.
That said, I can report that when I first started making pictures, photography-wise, I was interested only in appealing to the viewers eye. That was primarily driven by the fact that I was making a living making pictures for the advertising / marketing / communications industry wherein appealing to the viewers eye is the raison d'être for one's existence.
It was not until I consulted on the seminal book, the new color photography by Sally Euaclaire (there is a review here - note the date, 11/08/81, which puts the comments about Eggleston in an interesting perspective and FYI, a good clean used copy, it's long out of print, can be had in the $125-250 range), that I came to embrace the idea that pictures could also appeal to intellect. That set me to thinking about picturing and actually picturing in an entirely new direction - pictures with meaning beyond the visually obvious or, in the case of many new color photographs, the not so visually obvious, as in the oft heard comment, "why the hell did you take that picture?"
Consequently, I started working anew in photography. Born-again, so to speak. While I still attempted to appeal to the viewer's eye, my subject matter was selected by the desire to get beneath the surface of things by attempting to make pictures that encouraged the idea of getting beneath the surface of the print. To attempt to dig into, if the not the meaning of life, then into the meaning of the things that make up so much of everyday life. Indeed, the very stuff that makes up the background of daily life that is most often taken for granted or, perhaps more accurately, completely overlooked or ignored.
My picturing is mostly likely, at its very root, an attempt to appreciate everyday / commonplace things in order to live a more "connected" life as opposed to sleep-walking through so much of it as one waits for the next big thing.
And, as I have stated time and time again, particular-qualities-of-the-medium-wise, there is no other medium in the visual arts that is more suited for dealing with the real than that of photography with its intrinsic characteristic / quality as a cohort with the real.
Reader Comments (3)
I have to ask this: Have there been times when photography has failed you?
Matt - failed me in what way?
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?