Art – specifically, the creation of photographic prints[1] – is a process by which I attempt to explain the visual world to myself. While photography is also how I explain myself – including how that understanding works and what I think is worth trying to comprehend – to the world, that explicatory aspect is secondary, almost incidental (at least to me) were it not unavoidable. Photography is solipsistic but without the courage of its own convictions.
Photographic art is both an analytic effort and a synthetic process.
What does it mean to say that photographic art is an analytic process? At a minimum, it means that it is a conscious and reasonably systemic attempt to understand the visual world, as well investigating how that understanding works and how that understanding might be successfully communicated visually. These are the critical aesthetic inquiries to be addressed in the photographic enterprise. In attempting to answer these questions, it becomes reasonably clear that each of these questions is a facet of the same fundamental aesthetic problem. Accordingly, the failure to comprehend a constructive forward path regarding any of these questions almost certainly blocks a sufficient resolution of the other ones. The obverse is also true: resolution of any one or more of these issues necessarily increases the likelihood of overall aesthetic success.
Understanding the visual world on an aesthetic level means, at a minimum, comprehending the formal elements of that world: the geometry of the visual moment, the temporal shadings of light and dark, the rhythm of color – in short, the overall order or organization of the visual scene. It also means grasping the disorder, the entropy, in the visual scene. Often the disorder seems to overwhelm everything else, but perfect disorder is almost impossible to achieve or find, as elusive as a truly random number. This is true whether the visual scene is a natural one or a man made one, although man made visual scenes often tend to an oppressive and uninformative symmetry.
The rewards of this effort are often substantial: understanding that the ordinary, inconsequential visual scene that we regularly walk past without any further consideration may be, and often is, intensely interesting.[2] The unnoticed becomes organic (even if man made); the random starts to take on the context of an implicit order or structure, even if ultimately chaotic. This is not, however, to imply that the visual scene takes on a deeper significance or meaning, but simply that the logic of the visual scene may be understood. It is important not to read too much into the visual scene, to artificially and sentimentally give it a metaphorical or emotional weight that is neither warranted nor helpful. At worst, this becomes a distraction.
Indeed, this effort of visual exploration can have staying power beyond any particular photograph or collection, irrevocably affecting how one looks at the world. It becomes more and more difficult to simply walk on by and not notice. The visual world is full of odd and surprisingly interesting things: the vertical reach of a telephone pole, the arc of cables unevenly bisecting the frame, the cumulative hidden geometry, all coming together in a formal structure — all of which can vanish with a step to the left or to the right. Each act of observation becomes another line in an ongoing manifesto against somnambulism.
Since consciousness – and thus any understanding – is an active, synthetic, process, this means not simply looking for whatever form or structure that might appear to already be there, but choosing to impose my own – and understanding both that I have done so, and how I have done so. This synthetic process, at a more deliberate and consciously aware level, is ideally reflected in the photographic image itself. By pointing and focusing the camera there rather here, by virtue of each technical detail in capture, processing and printing (i.e., focal length, aperture and so on) I have made both an effort to understand exactly what I am looking at and have attempted to impose a sense of order and organization on the visual scene.[3] In doing so, I have learned something new: about what I have seen, about how I see, about how to see. Each decision in the photographic process is an amalgam of the analytic and synthetic.
The last item requires some further explanation: to the extent that I have learned to see, I have done so not only by seeing the order and disorder that might already be there, but by imposing order and disorder on the visual scene. If the photograph is successful, it has the potential[4] to communicate at least some of the foregoing to the viewer.[5] If it imparts none of these – either because they are not there in the first place (i.e., there’s nothing new to learn, or the photographer has failed to do so) or because the aesthetic problem of communication has not been adequately solved – then the photograph is a failure and merits no further time on the part of the photographer or the observer.[6]
Moreover, understanding this synthetic process and how it works, how it leaves its fingerprints, is part of the analytic process itself. Because our visual consciousness is itself synthetic, understanding the visual world means, among other things, understanding that the order and relationships that we “see” are to varying degrees constructs of our consciousness. We learn how to see by understanding the nature of sight.
[1] The word “creation” encompasses capture, editing and printing, with the photographic print as the ultimate object.
[2] That is why, at least to me, a thoughtful photograph of the ordinary and the mundane – a vacant lot, an apparently empty street – is often far more interesting than the most beautifully executed photograph of natural splendor. No one needs to explain why I should look at unspoiled nature and as a result, the new information conveyed by most such photographs is by definition limited (so limited that such photographs often lapse into cliché). Conversely, explicating the visual interest of the normally unseen can revelatory. A photograph that does so tells me something new, something that I did not know before. For easy examples, compare almost any random set of Stephen Shore or Robert Adams photographs with those of, say, Ansel Adams. The former require more work, more cognition, than the latter, but the rewards are commensurate.
[3] As a corollary, each technical decision should have an aesthetic purpose and not merely be the result of habitual preference or fetish. Different aesthetic problems call for different aesthetic approaches.
[4] It is probably most accurate to state this in terms of a probability of successful communication than as a binary yes or no phenomenon. Whether this communication successfully occurs depends not only on, among other things, the photographer and the photographic image, but the viewer. The viewer may or may not have the requisite “vocabulary”, as well as the time, patience and interest, to understand what may or may not have been attempted to be communicated by the photographer. Indeed, because the photographic image is itself a visual scene, the same points that observation is both an analytic and synthetic process applies to viewing of a photographic image.
[5] Whether that viewer needs to be a third party or may be the photographer is a question reserved for further discussion.
[6] This is not, however, a question of “expressing” my feelings, whatever that might be. My own understanding is a formal one, not simply the product of my emotions, which while important to me, in no way tell me what it is I am looking at. Or why I might care.
© 2017 Lawrence Gottesman. All rights reserved.