civilized ku # 837 ~ ex post facto, pt II - the BIG DUH

Beer taps ~ Last Dog Café - Binghamton, NY • click to embiggenIn response to yesterday's ex post facto entry, Matt Dallos commented:

... As someone else who has also based nearly all of his creative work around place, I'm looking forward to your thoughts on this.

Matt's assertion that he is "someone else who has also based nearly all of his creative work around place" lumps his pictures and my pictures together with about one-zillion-and-a-half other pictures makers whose pictures are based around place. This fact is not a dig at Matt's statement but rather it is, for me, a bit of a no-duh reality check.

Nevertheless, I mention this fact because, right from the beginning of writing about my thoughts, re: place, I want to make it perfectly clear that basing my picture making endeavors around the idea of place is hardly a novel concept. I don't believe that it is stretching the point to suggest that pictures of place are a picturing staple of choice for a large percentage of picture makers, from snapshoters to "serious" amateurs to fine art makers to professionals. All across the picture making spectrum, pictures of place abound.

That said, IMO (and I am by no means alone), not all pictures of place are created equal. Leaving aside camera-club matters such camera / processing technique and all of the associated "creative" falderal, there are only a few meaningful distinctions which set various approaches to place-based pictures apart - IMO, the 2 most important distinctions are represented by those differences between the Romantics / Transcendence group and the Realist / Grounded group.

As Frank Gohlke wrote (see link in yesterday's ex post facto entry):

...the Romantics seek Transport; their observations and perceptions are important to the degree that they are a platform from which the Imagination can begin its flights to higher realms of being. They continually contrast an unsatisfactory present with an exalted state, timeless and placeless, to which certain natural scenes offer a portal, leaving behind ordinary nature with its ceaseless round of generation, mortal struggle, and extinction. Thoreau, on the other hand, no matter how far he travels, imaginatively or bodily, returns to the here and now of Concord and the Nineteenth Century. Transcendence exists in the present moment or not at all...

Now, it should come as no surprise that I place myself and my picture making endeavors squarely in the Realist / Grounded group. And, relative to place-based picture making, I believe that only those engaged in making pictures of "the here and now" (as opposed to those making pictures of manufactured "exalted states") are capable of revealing a true sense of place.

For the R/T group, place is just a place, a staging ground / prop for their imagined flights of fancy. Although most in the R/T group profess a deep respect / appreciation for place, their true intent is most often revealed by, as an example, their stated goal of "chasing the light" or some other singular photo-fetishistic pursuit which is only tangentially connected to place. The result thereof is the manufactured representation of an "exalted state" - places which, as Gohlke states (and I agree), are "timeless and placeless".

For the R/G group, place is what matters. They get their kicks, transcendence wise, on Route 66. Or, as seen in Stephen Shore's American Surfaces, on a cross country trip with a point-and-shoot style Rollei 35. Shore's pictures* in American Surfaces have been stated to be "a meditation on what it means to be in the world". "What it means to be in the world" is precisely the point of (or one of the important points) true place-based picture making.

All of the preceding said, I have come to realize that my personal picture making is, in large part, about "what it means to be in the world". Especially so, re: in the real world, not some idealized exalted state. In that real world, the place in which I find myself is / becomes everything.

Meaning is everywhere. Place is drenched in it if only we can see it. If only we can see what is there and ignore what we wish were there. Once again, as Gohlke writes:

... pursuing an intimate knowledge of your surroundings is valuable because it grounds you in the concrete, in the Now, and helps you hold on to yourself in a time of incessant, dizzying change. What we now call a Sense of Place was for Henry Thoreau just a matter of planting your feet solidly somewhere so that the soul can take root and be nourished by the connection.

*footnote on seeing - the phrases and thoughts in my mind were taking “natural pictures,” and making a “visual diary.”..I’d open a door, and there would be this bed. I’d get up in the morning and open the bathroom door, and there would be this toilet. I’d go to the diner and there would be this food on this surface, on this table....In photographic terms, if you remove as much of the photographic convention as possible, what you’re left with is yourself, and how you see. ~ Stephen Shore

Comments

[Matt]

I certainly didn't mean to imply photographing place is a novel concept. However, I disagree with your statement that "one-zillion-and-a-half" photographers take pictures of place. They take pictures of space. Maybe 1 out of 10 or 1 out of 1000 actually photograph place.(And I'm certainly not claiming to be one of these gifted few.)

I'd be interested in your thoughts on place as a topic vs. a place as a subject.