COVID continues to disrupt lives and shape our experiences. I wonder how this student and his friends would be playing in the snow if times were different.
It was a particularly cold January evening as a student, carrying his dinner, wandered back to eat alone in his dorm room. The snow only added to the cold.
I struggle to recall the Before Times when I could stop into the local donut shop and get a cup of coffee and warm my hands before heading back out to enjoy the last bit of darkness. Social distancing comes naturally to me. I have always needed to be alone. Not every day, perhaps, but regularly. That morning before the town had risen and before the fishermen climbed onto boats, I spent the last hours of night wandering the docks. A gentle lapping sound of the water against the pylons, the creaking and stretching of ropes tied around cleats, and my footsteps on the wooden piers.
I watch as the eastern sky brightens and think, soon these docks will be bustling with locals and tourists. It was the middle of winter, so probably more locals than tourists that time of year.
I have never developed a fondness for the coast and the little towns that cling to the shore, too busy and crowded. But that morning, sitting on a bench on that pier, I understood why so many people do like these towns. They are lovely and can, at the right time of day, be peaceful.
Looking at these photos reminds me of a time when being alone was a choice, a time of day or a place. They also remind me of not being alone, of walking away from the docks and back to have breakfast with my family.
I find something peaceful about these photographs. Looking at them recalls for me the days spent wandering alone. Now and then, when I was close to the road or near one of the trails, I would see other people. I might even hear them. But head north west, toward the San Andres mountains and soon I was all alone. Wandering up and down the gypsum dunes.
After about an hour they all began to look alike. The sun is relentless and seems to burn from above and below. A hat scarcely protects you from the glare so much light reflects up from the ground. Everywhere is either white sand or pale blue sky. It is easy to lose your way. There are no trails, no posts to mark the way. I understand how people get lost out here and, tragically, die from heat and dehydration. “What will I find over the next dune?” I wonder as I continue deeper into the dunes.
I paused near the top of each dune, marveling at the sight. As afternoon wore on, the sinking sun started casting amazing shadows, giving the dunes texture and shape that they lacked when the sun was higher. There are no footprints. No evidence of the last person who passed. I might be only a mile or so from the road, but I feel like I’m a million miles from anywhere. Just me and these mesmerizing shadows.
For some people, lush forests are a paradise. They long for the sound of a creek or the wind through the trees. For me, these desolate, expansive, unforgiving spaces are more appealing. That afternoon no breeze disturbed the silence. No birds flew overhead. No water anywhere. And yet so much to see. The ripples and soft contours. The subtle shadowing.
I had been wandering for hours but had probably walked only a few miles. Time and distance are different here in this pale landscape of undulating dunes — both seem meaningless here. I could have walked for hours more, captivated by the stark beauty of the swells and shadows, but late in the day I turned around and headed back. Any trace of my passage has long since disappeared. What is left are these photographs, the memories they evoke, and the hope of maybe one day returned to that land of light and shadows.
Get up before dawn and drive for hours. Camp somewhere or sleep in your vehicle at a trailhead. Get up before dawn again. Hike miles lugging all your equipment, ideally through inclement weather. Burn thousands of calories. Find an amazing scene few others will ever see. Set up tripod and point camera. Wait, sometimes for hours. Take a photo. Pack up equipment. Hike back to car. Drive home.
Despite all the effort and the beautiful photographs that effort often produces, in the end it’s a pretty easy way to take pictures.
Some initial thoughts on “photography as art” or “photography of art.”
In some cases, it seems easy to say that a photograph is the art, e.g., when the photographer doesn’t manipulate the scene, stage the subjects, or otherwise interfere with the world captured in the photograph. For landscape photographers who search for the right scene in the right light and the right conditions at the right time of year, the photograph is probably the art. Similarly, photographers who scour urban or interior spaces for details, or a fleeting scene. But I wonder about instances where the photographer as intervened, arranged, manipulated the objects in the photograph. When does the staged scene become the art and the subsequent photograph merely a photograph of that art?
A portrait or a still life both require the photographer to intervene and stage the scene, and seem to be the space where this question of “Art or photograph of art?” becomes rather thorny. When producing the portrait or still life required considerable skill, time, and effort, perhaps we could more easily see the work as art: Titian’s portraits, or Bruegel’s still life paintings, or Dürer’s drawings. But today, when almost anybody can make technically sound photographs, the quality and execution of the work is no longer sufficient to make it art.
The ease of producing photographic portraits and still lifes displaces the art from the final product, the photograph, back to the staging of the photograph. Photography, in this mode, risks becoming mimesis. The art, insofar as art is related to effort or skill or talent or vision, is in the staging of the scene, the creating and arranging of props, the directing of people in the frame. The photograph becomes a sort of single frame from a movie. Perhaps that’s why we hear so much about cinematic photography these days, and why color grading seems to be mandatory, and why any photograph of a gas station at night shot on CineStill is considered art. Photography has become merely the means of representing art.
Photography has always risked mimesis, risked being little more than a representation of art: Weston’s peppers; Penn’s portraits; Mapplethorpe’s flowers. But there seems to be something different today, at least in degree if not in kind. Weston, Penn, Mapplethorpe seemed to try to find the beauty in something, tried to reveal the beauty that was there as opposed to fabricating the beauty. Photography was, it seems, both the means and the material of the art. Mapplethorpe’s flowers were beautiful works of art because they were photographs. The photograph captured something that Mapplethorpe could imagine but was disguised, fleeting, or indiscernible. The photograph added something, was essential, was more than simply a representation of what anybody would have seen if they looked at the flower. Increasingly, the photograph doesn’t aspire to be art so much as it is content to be evidence. Evidence of having been somewhere, eaten something, creatively arranged an assortment of things, artistically staged some scene. Evidence that art was made.
Sometimes, for me, it is enough that a photograph is just what it purports to be. It doesn’t conceal some meaning or tell a story, doesn’t point to the photographer’s social agenda, and doesn’t reveal the photographer’s psychological anguish. It isn’t reportage or social commentary or documentary photography.
This, e.g., is a photograph of a flower. Just a flower.
Recently I heard a comment attributed to Todd Rundgren about the direct relationship between effort and value.1 Something to the effect: “Effort increases value.” The people talking understood Rundgren’s point to be: the harder you work at making a [piece of art] and the more effectively you convey that effort to the audience, the more valuable the [piece of art]. Some version of that opinion seems rather common lately. See, for example:
While these examples are drawn from photography, I could collect them from most other arts (e.g., writing, painting, woodworking, baking, knitting, sandcastle building).
I confess: I don’t see how knowing all this background context contributes to the value of a photograph (or any piece of art). For me, knowing the labor invested in producing a photograph has no effect on its aesthetic quality (or lack thereof). Perhaps I will appreciate or understand the photograph in a different way knowing the calories burnt or miles trekked or hours spent searching for that decisive moment, but I doubt that understanding will make like a photograph that I initially disliked, or make me dislike a photograph I had previously liked. In the end, the photograph is either aesthetically pleasing or not, visually compelling or not.
Thinking more about the comment attributed to Rundgren: what if he wasn’t saying anything about audiences but was, instead, saying something about makers. If approached that way, Rundgren’s comment contains a degree of truth but is not particularly new. I expect someone who is passionate about a particular endeavor to spend loads of time and effort doing it, more time and effort than people who are not passionate about it. That passion and effort will, I suspect, lead to making better art, excelling at some sport, crafting better tables, grilling better burgers, whatever. I’m not sure what Rundgren meant by “value” (and not even sure that he said it — I couldn’t be bothered to look it up), but maybe we can understand him to mean something like: If you work really, really hard, and do so with intentionality, you will get better at something. Then whatever you produce will be more valuable because it more fully embodies your intentions and goals. But that form of value is first and foremost a value to the artist (or athlete or woodworker or chef or whatever). Any value that an audience invests in the product (art, performance, burger, etc.) is secondary and a different type of value.
Robert Mapplethorpe Flora is a lovely book that highlights the subtle and varied beauty of flowers. And while we can read all sorts of meaning into his photos, meaning most often it seems shaped by what somebody thinks of Mapplethorpe the photographer, in the end they are just beautiful photographs.
I don’t think every photograph has to tell a story or reveal the inner psychological states of the photographer. Sometimes all I want to do is look at a pretty photograph.
Everybody takes photos of flowers. Snapshots. Artsy black-and-whites. Bold colors against dark backgrounds. Everybody. They are a photographic cliché, though I confess I don’t know quite what the original meaning or significance was in taking photos of flowers and so I don’t know what the practice has lost. I suspect part of the draw is: flowers are dependable subjects. They are easy to find. They don’t move. They can be arranged as you please.
Some photographers are able to transform ordinary flowers (and vegetables and fruits) into sensual images, e.g., Weston or Mapplethorpe.
For me photographing flowers combines the pleasures of working quietly and methodically. I enjoy the slow, deliberative process. I also learn a lot about light and how to get the light to illuminate the flower in different ways. But I will freely admit: I also enjoy the photographs. I think they can be beautiful: the elegant shapes and curves, the rich, subtle tones. Photographs don’t always have to tell a story or make a point or reveal some philosophical truth. Sometimes, it is enough for a photograph just to be pretty.
In the bygone days of film photographers with the resources and energy to print their own photographs weren’t constrained by anything but the size of paper they could purchase and their ingenuity for rigging up a system to project light onto that paper. But for most people who took their film down to the local Fotomat — those goofy little drive-up kiosks in shopping center parking lots — to be developed and printed, a couple options reigned: 4×6, 5×7. You could order enlargements, but they tended to fall into one of a few common sizes. The vestiges of these formats linger in the aspect-ratio options found in most photo processing applications. Photographers today are no longer constrained by those aspect ratios, but instead can (and should) think of aspect ratio as part of composition, i.e., an artistic choice.
I like the square format for some photos but not all (despite Instagram’s best efforts, I think the square format doesn’t work for most photographs). For me, graphic, simple images that have a prominent subject work best. Recently I took a few photos of some macarons and chocolates from the local French café, Delice et Chocolat.
For these photos, I really liked how the square format worked well with the overall composition I had imagined. A rectangular format, e.g., 4×6, might have worked for the first image, but I think it is stronger as a square. The second image would have been a disaster in some rectangular aspect ratio.