ku # 578 ~ Spring has sprung # 6

Bare tree at marsh edge • click to embiggenThe other evening I caught one of the BBC's episodes of their Genius of Photography (broadcast on the OVATION TV here in the US of A). The title of that episode is, Document for Artists.

The basic premise of the program is that the medium of photography, which was at first thought to be little more than the making of documents, albeit visual documents, eventually became to be viewed as more than mere documentation. That pictures could contain meaning(s) - whether intended by the picture maker or not - that transcended their nominal visual information.

The pictures of Eugene Atget, which were intended to be a "mere" record of things there were about to disappear - a way of life as represented by the monuments, houses, sites, streets, stores, cafes, of his beloved Paris, were used as an example of "pure" picture documents created without artistic intent that came to be considered as high Art. Interestingly enough, it was the avant-garde photographer/artist Man Ray who brought Atget's pictures to the attention of the Art World - an endeavor carried on by his then assistant, the photographer Berenice Abbott. It was through her life-long efforts that Atget and his pictures gained international recognition.

While I toil, picture-making wise, on the influential shoulders of many of the medium's past and present giants - Evans, Callahan, Porter, Shore, Meyerowitz, to name but a few - it is the totality of the voluminous body of work that Atget created that most influences my own picturing activities.

It seems rather obvious to me that the man was just flat-out obsessed with picturing his beloved Paris if for no other reason than his desire to record what would soon be lost - a drive that most accurately reflects my own predilection for picturing my beloved Adirondacks. Heaven knows that there is much that will soon be lost here in the Adirondacks - natural-world changes that are a consequence of global warming / climate change as well as social / cultural changes, aka - the destructive forces of the second/vacation home scourge/plague on local communities and institutions.

Unlike the document-making activities of Atget (but, on a somewhat ironic note, influenced by the eventual recognition of the Art inherent in his documents), my picture making activities are also informed and influenced by a conscious awareness of their artful instrumentality - aka, my oft-stated intent to illustrate and illuminate.

All of that said, there was a line regarding the medium of photography in the aforementioned tv program that I liked very much. To the best of my recollection, it went something like this:

Document influenced by Art. Art influenced by document.

That's a good one that says much about the medium's inherent characteristics and its potential to transcend the notion that a picture is just a picture.