civilized ku # 2307-08 ~ a question

Junipers with weather and "the light" ~ Stone Harbor, NJ • click to embiggenIn 1974, long before the 'digital revolution' landed on the shores of the picture making world, Robert Adams asked a very interesting question:

Many have asked, pointing incredulously toward a sweep of tract homes and billboards, why picture that? The question sounds simple, but it implies a difficult issue — why open our eyes anywhere but in undamaged places like national parks?

The question is part of Adams' Artist Statement from his book, The New West. A book (one of the prized books in my collection) of pictures of, for me, nearly inexplicable beauty - nearly inexplicable for me because:

1) the pictures are BW which, color being my medium, is not my preferred picturing genre of choice
2) the sense of "the light"* (from along the Colorado Front Range) is, well .... indescribably palpable and beautiful - a rather strange statement from someone like me who is an avowed non chaser of "the light"
3) the depicted referents - described by John Szarkowski, in the book's Foreword, as "dumb and artless agglomerations of boring buildings" - is not a subject matter which one would normally associate with the concept of beauty.

Nevertheless, the Adams' pictures are, indeed, beautiful in a manner both harmonious and discordant.

That said written, and back to the question at hand, one could reasonably assume that Adams' query was directed toward the "average" American and the "average" amateur picturing enthusiast who tended to point their cameras (in 1974, cameras, and only cameras, were what one used to make pictures) at iconic landscape vistas. Those picture makers, knowingly or not, were essentially trying to make pictures which were carbon copies of clichéd calender pictures - romanticized depictions of a pure unadulterated American landscape which was fast disappearing.

In 1974, Adams was one of a very few picture makers making pictures of what came to be known as the New Topographics. In a very real sense, his question was a cry to Americans to open their eyes and "see the facts without blinking". While most Americans, perhaps more than ever before (as a percentage of the population), still have not addressed, or even heard, his question, the same can not be said for picture makers.

Many avid amateur and some dedicated "fine art" professional picture makers still cling to the clichéd and predictable pretty picture syndrome but, with the unimaginable surge in the number of picture makers (attributable to the shear number of digital picturing devices in the hands of "everyone's a photographer now") more and more avid amateur picture makers are, in fact, making pictures of things new topographical.

Those picture makers have, literally and figuratively, "opened their eyes" and are engaged with the act of seeing, many on a daily basis. And their engagement is focused, not on the romanticized grand and spectacular, but on the world in which they find themselves on a daily basis. One could state that they are more fully engaged, picturing and living wise, with the real world rather than the idealized one which exists mainly in the imagination of the unimaginative.

In any event, Adams answered, in the same The New West Artist Statement, his own why-open-your-eyes question:

One reason is, of course, that we do not live in parks, that we need to improve things at home, and that to do it we have to see the facts without blinking. We need to watch, for example, as an old woman, alone, is forced to carry her groceries in August heat over a fifty acre parking lot; then we know, safe from the comforting lies of profiteers, that we must begin again.

Paradoxically, however, we also need to see the whole geography, natural and man-made, to experience a peace; all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty.

All of that said written, it is the work of eyes-open / facts-without-blinking picture makers I hope to feature in my magazine publishing venture.

*while it plays a vital role in the creation of Form which Adams' pictures convey, "the light" is not, by any means, the featured referent in his pictures. Rather, the pictures are most distinctly about place and (hu)man's place in it. When viewed in that light, "the light" is "merely" a helpful referential contingency (but nevertheless, integral) which beautifies the visual sensation of place.

Comments

[John Linn]

You wrote...

"Those picture makers have, literally and figuratively, "opened their eyes" and are engaged with the act of seeing, many on a daily basis."

I have not seen that. I see crappy photos of people holding beer glasses or mugging the camera. And even shots that have promise are technically so bad, even those made by people who should know better and have the skills to do better.

So you are saying the Facebook photographers are "seeing"?

[Svein-Frode]

Hopefully people enjoy the grand vistas of untouched nature because they are disgusted by the dehumanized world they live in. So in a sense, the pictures of pretty things can be said to have the exact same meaning as the pictures of ugly things.