man & nature # 116/17 ~ it pisses him off
Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 09:55AM 
Plastic bottle, fence, and moss • click to embiggenMany of the pictures of Minor White and Duane Michals are intended to be presented as a sequence - as diptychs, triptychs, or short narrative "stories". This approach to picturing as always interested me, most likely because my first photography job - to be more accurate, my US Army MOS (military occupation series) - was as a photo journalist.
An aside - The US Army trained me to be a supply clerk, a position that I never held. After training and arriving at my duty station in Japan (to which I was assigned as a supply clerk), I was immediately assigned by personnel as a draftsman (making charts and graphs) because of my ever-so-brief civilian experience in architectural studies. That job was excruciatingly boring, although it must be said that it was infinitely better than humping the boonies in Nam.
Long story, short - Being in a foreign land (that also happened to be home to a zillion camera makers) and bored as hell, I bought a camera and started making pictures (FYI, I processed the very first roll of color slide film I ever shot). In a matter of a few months, I started winning US Army photo contests and, as a result, just like that, I became a US Army photo journalist. My entire "training" in things photographic at that point was reading my camera manual - therefore knowing to center the in-camera exposure needle - and following some film processing instructions.
So, with that level of training, you can imagine my utter gut-twisting surprise and horror when (20 minutes prior to my first assignment) I was handed a beat up old 4×5 Speed Graphic as my Official US Army Photographic Equipment - say what? ... loading sheet film, the concept of parallax, a handheld light meter, rangefinder focusing ... say what?
In any event, as a matter of survival and not getting my butt chewed out, I needed to figure out how to make pictures that worked together to tell a story. Many of the "stories" appeared in Stars & Stripes and other Army pubs as "pure" pictures stories - a short couple-sentence intro and some photo captions but without any lengthy text. The "stories" succeeded or failed based solely upon the pictures and how they worked together to tell the story. It was a true out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire, learning-under-fire (pressure, not bullets) experience.
All of that said, I was making pictures that were intended to be presented in sequence long before I knew the names, Minor White and Duane Michals, or had access to any any of their ideas on the subject:
A sequence of photographs is like a cinema of stills. The time and space between photographs is filled by the beholder, first of all from himself, then from what he can read in the implications of design, the suggestions springing from treatment, and any symbolism that might grow from within the subject itself. - Minor White
It is curious that I always want to group things, a series of sonnets, a series of photographs; whatever rationalizations appear, they orginate in urges that are rarely satisfied with single images. - Minor White
I think of them (photographers) as being newspaper reporters, and myself as a short story writer. ~ Duane Michals
I was an OK photographer at reportage, and to be a photographer then meant you had to do that, so when I did an exhibit where I began to tell stories half the people walked out ... Things that are now considered almost traditional to do in photography schools, I was the first one to do them! I'm saying that because I know when things get written up, in books on sequences, I'm just a footnote. It's outrageous, and it pisses me off! ~ Duane Michals
Reader Comments (3)
It's coincidentally odd for me, right now, to be reading Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. That Minor White quote about time and space could have been directly lifted from McCloud's book, which while being about what comics are, is also about what else comics are. About a lot of other things than just comics, too, if read with your head at a certain angle.
It rather startling that the Army gave you a job that you were good at, even if it was with outdated tools. What year was this?
Hey Luke - I operated under the notion of you-never-get-what-you-don't-ask-for in that the one-and-only photog in the base Information Office was being transferred out without a replacement in the pipeline. So I began a campaign of not-so-subtle self aggrandizement / promotion, photo-wise, that ultimately resulted in my assignment to the position.
The year was 1967.