— make something every day, something for an audience of one;
— give away the things I make, leave them behind, stash them on shelves in stores, send them to strangers, and otherwise cast them into the universe for others to find;
— look around with the eyes and curiosity of a child;
— talk to strangers to learn how they see the world;
— laugh at the things I find important;
— be me, because if I don’t nobody will be.
Slunk Emo ceremoniously attached the lens. The live stream on Stumbler broadcast through the universe video of what he was doing.
He straightened and nodded to Slunk Ome, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the circuit when he threw it. The switch that would link, all at once, all the sprawling algorithms and computing devices—from servers to personal computers, phones, smart watches, and internet-enabled appliances, more than ninety-six billion machines–into the super algorithm that would connect them all to the 47.8 exapixel camera, creating one massive opti-cybernetics machine that would combine not only all the photographs ever taken but also all the photographs ever imagined.
Slunk Ome spoke briefly to the billions simultaneously refreshing the page. Then, after a moment’s silence, he said, “Now, Slunk Emo.”
Slunk Emo threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power through trillions of neural networks mining data from even the obscurest corners of the internet, including abandoned NoLongerMySpace pages. Servers strained and pages buffered and bandwidth limits were exceeded. After a few moments Stumbler’s network caught up to the surge in users.
Slunk Emo stepped back and drew a deep breath. “The honor of requesting the first image is yours, Slunk Ome.”
“Thank you,” said Slunk Ome. “It shall be a picture that no single photographer has been able to take.”
He turned to face the opti-cybernetics machine. “Can you now create the perfect photograph?”
A mighty voice answered without hesitation, without a single click of the shutter.
“Yes. And now there is a perfect photograph.”
Sudden fear flashed on the face of Slunk Emo. He leaped to grab the switch.
A bolt of lightning from the hot shoe struck him down and fused the switch shut.*
Meanwhile, a guy with a camera sits at the local skating rink taking blurry pictures.
[*Based on “Answer,” a short story by Fredric Brown.]
I had an appointment in the city the other day. Given the train schedule, I would either arrive about 45 minutes early or 5 minutes late. I opted to arrive early so that I could spend half an hour or so taking pictures in the beautiful train station.
The station was bustling with people — commuters, students heading home for the summer, tourists arriving in the city. In the 30 minutes I spent in the station, I took a bunch of photographs that I will assemble into a small book, “30 Minutes in 30th Street.”
Once I make a bunch, I’ll leave them in local coffee shops and Little Free Libraries in the area. Just the latest in my pamphlet and limited editions projects. Let me know if you want one.
In A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time John Brinckerhoff Jackson reflects on the meaning of our increasingly urbanized and industrialized landscapes and how we interact with and live in those spaces. He is neither the first nor the most recent to draw attention to various aspects of the built environment, with a particular focus on vernacular structures, e.g., garages, mobile homes, parking lots. His book does seem to me to be more optimistic than many.
Reading Jackson’s book made me think about the changing vernacular of interior spaces that permeates a significant portion of a new library. What sort of behavior and activities do these spaces encourage? What comparisons to the color schemes and lighting invite? How are different parts of the library marked by different interior spaces? How does it all differ from the former, dank and crowded and dark library?
The different floors of the library are intended for different practices, embodied in the layout and decor and furniture on each.
Nobody would relax in these chairs, with their wheels, rigid backs, and spare armrests they are clearly intended to be tools. Roll up to your desk, work, pivot if necessary, roll back. Built for labor not for comfort. Unsurprising to find these near the stacks of books packed tight in their compact shelving.
Ascend from the bowels of the building to find comfort, warmer color palettes, and tables that invite leisure rather than work. Nestled in alcoves are comfortable chairs around a table where you can linger, perhaps read a book or chat with a friend. Whatever work occurs here, it is of a decidedly sort from that which happens in the floor below.
There’s a particular, almost poetic beauty to these different spaces. The limited palettes, the orthogonal repetition of the lower floor echo visually the rigid, tabular presentation of information. Down there habits and practices are structured and regularized. One floor up, the welcoming curves of the chairs, the table, the lamp, and soft cushions almost demand a different set of activities. Here conversations and work, insofar as that occurs on this floor, are less regulated. Just as Robert Adams found beauty in truck stops, generic houses, unadorned churches, and roads, we can find beauty in quotidian spaces, with their subtle efforts to shape our behaviors. We just need to pause and linger a bit, to look around.
I went to see a show last night, an album celebration show. The music was great, but what really impressed me was the musicians. Sure, there were a number of people there to see the show, but our presence was irrelevant. Watching the band play and especially E.J., the front man, I saw a person who creates because he has to create. He would be writing and performing songs whether or not anybody listened. If he took the place of that famous tree in the woods and nobody was around to hear him, he would still be making and performing music. He creates. His creations might also be art, but that’s irrelevant to him.
The show reminded me that I make photographs for me. Some of them will be “original,” others will look like numerous other photographs. The last few weeks have been drippy around here. I started to notice puddles on sidewalks as an opportunity to look at trees in a different way, to take the season’s last photographs of trees before the leaf out. For the next week or so I took lots of photos of trees reflected in puddles on my commute to and from work. Pictures of reflections are a dime a dozen, even with inflation. I will not take an original picture of a reflection. But that assumes I take pictures with an audience in mind, one that has surely seen dozens of pictures of reflections. By that metric, pictures are little more than the subject captured in the frame. But this misses the point, at least for me.
I don’t care if at first glance my photos look like pictures everybody has taken. Those photographers are not me and did not take my photos. If, as Wim Wenders has asserted, the camera points both directions, forward at the subject and back at the photographer, then photographs I take of reflections are not like anybody else’s. They answer to my questions and concerns and aesthetic sensibilities. For that reason, when I take a picture or print a photograph, I think only of one audience, an audience of one: me.
I make the photographs I need to see in the world, not the photographs I think the world needs to see. Maybe that’s the difference between creating and making art. While the latter fulfills its purpose when an audience interacts with it, the former fulfills its purpose by existing. I am not an artist but rather a person who creates.
The vagueness of a daily photography project or the magnitude of a “365 project” has always put me off. A more finite, one still life each day for a month, worked better. Even that project, however, lost some of its appeal by the end:
However, I have largely disliked this project. I find it dull. I have fallen into the habit of thinking that making the single photograph (which I do each evening) is sufficient. As long as I do that, I’ve accomplished something for the day. Consequently, I find myself taking fewer photographs as I wander with my camera. As if I’ve replaced taking photos of the world around me with taking my daily flash photo.
The monotony was both too boring and not sufficiently compelling. As I said at the end of that project, maybe something more focused — my version of Micheal Beirut drawing his left hand every day, or Joseph Sudek photographing things in his window. An important aspect of such a daily project, for me, is prompting me to look at the world in new ways. Trying to capture that aspect, I have been working on a daily project this past month: “One Thought Per Day.”
I made a little booklet, a sort of diary. Early each day I write a thought, sometimes a question, on the day’s page. From that thought I generate a single word. That word guides me as I look for a scene (I don’t get to stage it — I must find it) that relates to the day’s word/thought. I get to take one picture.
The page above shows the thought for April 16, 2023. Posturing, pretending to be something I am not, was the thought that I sought to find as I went through the day. I found, standing on a windowsill in the department lounge, a small articulated mannequin (why an IKEA mannequin is in the lounge I can’t imagine). It became the day’s photograph.
At the end of the month I will print the day’s on a page the precedes the day’s photograph, and then assemble them into a booklet (the same dimensions as the diary I use to record the thoughts). In the end, I’ll produce a small booklet, 2 1/2″ x 4 1/4″, of about 60 pages — 30 thoughts and 30 photographs, which I will hand bind.
For me, the combination of thinking, writing, searching, and photographing has been really productive. Guided by an idea or thought, I have looked at the world around me for scenes that somehow capture that thought. I have found that I spend more time thinking about the world as I move through it. I don’t know if I have taken more pictures because of it, but I think that I’ve put more thought into most of those pictures.
I also just love making things, material things. I enjoyed making the little booklet in which to record my thoughts. I am looking forward to making the booklet filled with those thoughts and the photographs they generated.
As with most of my projects, I will likely make a handful and leave them places, cafes, Little Free Libraries, benches, wherever. I’ll probably send some to random people as well. For me, that is an important part of my entire project. Casting whatever I make out into the world (Nick Tauro Jr.’s version of this is brilliant — if only I had an old newspaper box).
Are we more or less alone now that we hold “the world” in our hands? Do we seek out empty places so that the real world doesn’t interfere with our experiencing the virtual world? Maybe in the 1980s Aztec Camera could remark, “They call us lonely when we’re really just alone,” but today I worry that we are both alone and lonely.
Diptychs (and triptychs). Thinking about photos in groups: twos, threes, and fours, maybe more (the grids of photos by the Bernd & Hilla Becher, e.g.). How does pairing photos change them? How does looking for pairs alter the process of photographing? I don’t know, but I like to think about it.
Keith Smith noted: By saying he was going to make a picture of some thing, he ended up making second-hand, non-visual pictures (see “Not vivid, Not exciting.”). I wonder how often I take pictures of something I have imagined (whether or not I’ve said it aloud to others or silently to myself) rather than take pictures visually of things I have never described or imagined. How often do I not “see” something because I was fixated on finding what I hadn’t seen?
The other day I walked by a tree resplendent in fall color, leaves wafting down in the breeze. Under the tree was a lone chair, bathed in warm light reflecting up from the fallen leaves and filtering down through those still on the tree. I imagined that scene, returned with my camera, and took a dozen supremely mediocre pictures of it, from lots of different angles. Nothing.
The other night I wandered out after dark, looking to spend some time alone. Nothing more. As usual, I took my camera with me. I took a handful of pictures, some of which, in hindsight, have become interesting (to me) photographs. In the moment, I had no real sense of the scene being anything. I just took a picture. After the fact, and with some editing, I have ended up with photographs that I quite like, photographs that I had not previously described in words.
After noting the problem of taking pictures of scenes he has already described in words, Smith goes on to say:
I can look at a completed picture and find, ‘Oh, yes, I used tertiary colors here, complementary there, saturated color in this small shape as a solution to counter balance the weight of the heavy form in another part of the composition, et cetera.”
Smith’s observation seems, to me, to describe much of how people discuss composition. It is easy, after the fact, to find the rule of thirds, the golden spiral, golden triangle, balancing elements, leading lines, etc., and to assert that the photographer used them in taking the picture. As if to say: while out in the field, or even in the studio, the photographer viewed the world through some rule-of-thirds overlay, or golden spiral overlay, or whatever. More often, I think, what we mean (and perhaps should state clearly) is something like: Now that the photograph is complete, we can find in it evidence of the rule of thirds, complementary colors, a golden spiral, etc. I do not doubt that we can find evidence of those compositional rules, but I do doubt that those rules were operative when the photographer “took the photo,” i.e., when the photographer was out in the wild and pushed the shutter release button. In other words, insofar as “rules of composition” implies that they were operative in composing the picture, I don’t think they play much of a role. I think they might play a role in editing pictures and producing finished photographs.
The question, then, seems to be: When does a photograph acquire those aspects. In the comfort of the studio or the office? Then the photographer (and perhaps the photographer’s assistants) has the luxury to review all the pictures from a particular trip or day or session or whatever and has selected the pictures considered best (see, e.g., the oft-praised Magnum Contact Sheets book). From that subset of pictures the photographer (and perhaps some assistants) then often crops or edits that image further (see, e.g., Arnold Newman’s portrait of Igor Stravinsky).
Taking Smith’s comment seriously, I wonder how many pictures turn out to be dull, second-hand photographs because they merely reflect the rules of composition, and how many pictures made without any attention to the rules of composition turn out to be great photographs.
I’m not interested in the issue of “breaking” the rules of composition (I’m not interested in the rules of composition at all and all discussions of learning them to break them seem to me to be stale.). Instead, I wonder how relying on any rule, guiding principle, pre-described scene, goal, plan, expectation, affects my photography. I am motivated by Smith’s subsequent comments:
We must learn to see: nature, space, color; to see photographically, to see with our third eye, to read visual material; it is a constant struggle. We must find various ways of learning. One of many is concentration. We must daily practice observation — we are in the business of seeing. Seeing demands research, discipline, training and courage. It takes energy to be visually perceptive rather than to follow simulated vision.
How many of these former estates get recycled, finding new life as (often it seems) institutions of some sort? The opulence and exclusivity of a century ago transmogrified into some (quasi-)utilitarian and occasionally public space. The other afternoon, rainy and cold, I wandered around one such place. If you look closely at the main house, you will see traces of its regal past, in the stonework, the (repurposed) porte-cochère, the expansive entry and stairway. On the landing, original Tiffany windows glow in the evening’s gloom, incongruous next to the window A/C unit next to it.
Beyond the main house and stately old trees, there is little left of the estate. There’s little reason to manicure the lawns or tend the gardens. Students don’t tend to pay much attention to gardens and lawns, nor do teachers. The grounds are now kept practical and utilitarian. Fountains, statues, and sundials, common on estate grounds, have been replaced by chairs and benches. Four sit empty in the drizzle and faint glow of the lamp.
In some twisted way, I guess we can consider this a form of “recycle and reuse” bantered about so often these days even if it fails to “reduce” anything.