Photography: Literary?

Photography seems to be the most literary of the graphic arts.

- Walker Evans

'Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits'

I started reading this biography on a trip this past winter:

I saved a few quotes from it. Here are 2 from the introduction that I particularly like:

Most of Lange's photography was optimistic, even utopian, not despite but precisely through its frequent depictions of sadness and deprivation. By showing her subjects as worthier than their conditions, she called attention to the incompleteness of American democracy. And by showing her subjects as worthier than their conditions, she simultaneously asserted that greater democracy was possible.

And here's a bit about "documetary" photography and representation:

The camera's capacity to replicate what the eye can see made it appear, originally, to be the ultimate documentary tool. It seemed to be a machine for exact replication, its products machine-made, until the myriad means of constructing photographs were widely understood. Invented just as art steered toward expressing a subjective vision, an individual inner consciousness, the camera seemed limited to representing that which is visible to the naked eye. Honoré Daumier said that "photography described everything and explained nothing." Photographers engaged in some self-delusion along these lines; Walker Evans called documentary "a stark record ... [of] actuality untouched." Lange did not fuss about exact representation in her photography. Her experience as a portrait photographer left her at ease in retouching an errant hand or shadow, in asking her subjects to move to a different spot or position. Like an historian, she wanted her photographs to emphasize what she saw as the main point and to prevent her viewers from being distracted by details. In her portrait studio she wanted to reveal the inner, not the outer, life and character of her subjects, and she continued the search for hidden truths in her documentary work.

Springsteen on Frank

I've always wished I could write songs the way he takes pictures.

- Bruce Springsteen on Robert Frank

(Supposedly, Springsteen has multiple copies of Frank's photo book The Americans).

Photography as "Mirrors" or "Windows"

I've been reading "Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists" these last few weeks. I found an interesting thought from John Szarkowski:

What makes this more interesting for me is that my "Faribault County" work from 20 years ago would fit as a "window," but my more recent "4 a.m." work is definitely a "mirror." I don't know what that means, but it's made me stop and think about my own art making...

"Photography is a foreign language..."

I found this outside of the art room at Blake High School in Minneapolis:

"Photography is a foreign language everyone thinks he speaks" -Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Is he saying people THINK they are good at photography (or think they can "understand" photography) when they really don't? Is this a bit of an elitist take on amateur photographers? Is he talking about the proliferation of cameras in our society over the last few decades? Without knowing where diCorcia places his emphasis in that quote, I can't get a solid grasp of what he's trying to say, but I'm still intrigued...

Buzz Lightyear Quote

Thoughts on the Power of Early Photography (From a Mathew Brady Bio)

The start of Chapter 3 in "Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation" mentions something that I've pondered a lot. And it shares 3 points that I have brought up in my photography classes for years: the inital importance of early photographs can't be comprehended today; photography was a subtle way to level out different classes of people; and because photography was considered to be more of a "truthful" science, it took a lot of work for it to be accepted as "art:"

Americans in the 1840s and '50s embraced the new and growing art of photography. The availability of images from the most distant places on earth made the world a more knowable place, a revolution in human knowledge comparable to the invention of moveable type or the Internet. But of more immediate personal value was the possibility of having images of yourself and the people you loved fixed forever in a form you could possess and pass on. Suddenly a kind of immortality previously available only to the rich, who could aford to have their portraits paint, or to those with the means to commission a miniature from an itinerant painter, was now within the reach of almost everyone. Even if you could afford a painted portrait, the result would be another person's impression or interpretation of what you looked like. This new medium, it was generally agreed, portrayed you as you really were. At a time when children often did not survive childhood and might be remembered only by a posthumous photo taken of them in burial clothes, or when a son who went out west in search of gold had little hope of communicating with the family he had left behind, or they with him, or a husband went to sea leaving a wife and family whose images he might gaze upon and who themselves could not know when or if he would return, the small daguerreotypes that people in the 1840s and '50s rushed to have made had a value that we can only guess at today.

Wilson also makes an interesting point 2 paragraphs later in the same chapter:

Photography was also among the first examples (along with the telegraph and the railway) of a phenomenon that has become almost commonplace in our time - an advance in technology that transforms rapidly from a state of inconceivable mystery or even magic to something that everyone would and must have access to. In his 1853 dictionary, Noah Webster ended a brief description of the daguerreotype process with "and then the images appear as by enchantment." Photography was at first as surprising as the possibility of wireless telephone communication seemed to us two decades ago, and then as urgent a necessary as the smartphone today.

This book was published nearly a decade ago, so you might change that last sentence to THREE decades ago as Wilson writes about "wireless telephones." But the point still stands.

Peter Adams on Cameras

As someone who just had a solo exhibition consisting of work shot on a 16-year-old digital camera, I tend to agree.

Photography: "The Alignment of Fleeting Specificities"

Alec Soth posted something on Instagram recently that was worth saving and remembering. Here was the text, and the 2 images follow:

2002


2019

Bresson Quote

Holga Quotes

I miss working with my Holga. And when we went to "remote learning" last year, I had to scrap my Holga-based project in my Advanced Photo class. Anyway, here are some fun "Holga quotes" I found on FreestylePhoto:

"Take your Holga out for a ride. Stop often. Play."
- Kit Frost, Professional Photographer

"Mechanically the Holga is simplicity itself. The nature of the Holga places emphasis on seeing, thinking, and interacting with the environment at hand."
- Joe Ostraff, Professor, BYU

"The Holga summons up Dadaist traditions of chance, surprise, and willingness to see what can happen."
- Robert Hirsch, Photographic Historian, in his book Photographic Possibilities

"As for the Holga, I like using it and making my students use it, because it encourages the photographer to concentrate on his/her relationship with the subject without technology getting in the way. The resulting images depend on the photographer's presence (of mind and body)."
- Lesley Krane, educator at California State University, Northridge

"As the Koordinator of the Krappy Kamera Competition, I've seen thousands of images produced with this camera. I am always awed by the variety of images that can be produced with such minimal equipment."
- Sandy Carrion, Coordinator of the Krappy Kamera Competition

"I still have the first Holga I ever bought back in 1988. I loved it then and still do, especially with black and white film."
- Julia Dean, founder of the Julia Dean Photographic Workshops

"I love my Holgas and I have eight of them. As a designer and art director, I have used Holga cameras on many photo shoots and clients love the different effects!"
- Randy Thomas, Founder, Randy Thomas Design Agency

Today

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

- Susan Sontag (in 1977)

Capturing the Light: Regarding "The Pencil of Nature"

Here's an interesting 2 paragraphs from Capturing the Light as the authors wrote about Talbot and The Pencil of Nature:

In developing the calotype, he had turned to photographing various locations in and around this home at Lacock and then, with the assistance of his Dutch valet Nicolaas Henneman, whom he trained himself, taking the process on the road nad photographing the picturesque architecture of Oxford and Paris. He executed a few portraits and group shots, but, typical of Talbot's reserved nature, it was the landscape and cityscape that attracted his interest. In 1844 he set to work on disseminating the details of the calotype process, by devising a book, to be published in serial form as six individual booklets or fascicles, each containing actual photographic prints from his own calotype negatives. This series was called The Pencil of Nature and its purpose was twofold: first to bring the calotype to the public attention by showing that photographs could be published in book form; and second, to set out and describe the various modes in which Talbot believed that photography in the long term would prove most useful. These included views of architecture; landscapes; still lifes; the cataloguing of scientific objects; genre scenes; and the copying of works of art. He did not include portraiture, no doubt thinking in terms of the scientific rather than personal or recreational use of his process. Perhaps he wished to elevate the calotype above portraiture, which to him seemed the realm of the everyday, jobbing photographer and not that of the artist. Or perhaps Talbot himself had privately recognized that the better results in portraiture were achieved by the daguerreotype, and that it was sensible therefore not to engage in direct competition with it in this respect.

In order to provide the great quantity of pictures that he intended to include in The Pencil of Nature, Talbot worked closely with Henneman, whom he had not promoted to full-time photographer. They set up a printing studio at Reading, about halfway between Lacock and London. Known as the Reading Establishment, it was able to turn out dozens, if not hundreds, of prints every day (certainly in sunny weather) and had no problems producing the images needed for Talbot's book. Sadly though, the series was not a success and in April 1846 Talbot had to abandon it after only six issues, despite a small review in The Times 'earnestly commend[ing] this work to notice of the public'. What remains of The Pencil of Nature, however, is a thing of exquisite beauty. The cover for each fascicle was an intricate image by Owen Jones, an influential designer whose interest in Arabic geometric designs was beautifully combined with neo-Gothic fonts and flourishes to create the distinctive look of the series. Overall it contained twenty-four Talbot calotypes, many of which now are iconic in the history of early photography. The few surviving copies of the entire series today are, of course, worth many thousands of pounds.

Throughout the Capuring the Light, I was struck many times with how insignificant certain "discoveries" or ideas were 170-180 years ago that today we can look back upon and know that those discoveries set us up for where we currently are. Many were brushed under the rug at the time. But I suppose you know what they say about hindsight...

Here's my modern edition of The Pencil of Nature that I just had to purchase:

In The News: Three Photography Links

Here are 3 recent photography-related links... just things I found interesting:

• ONE: Highest Resolution Photo of the Sun:

About a week ago, Miami astronomers released the highest resolution images of the sun that anyone has ever created. It shows "a surface that’s divided up into discrete, Texas-size cells, like cracked sections in the desert soil. You can see plasma oozing off the surface, rising high into the solar atmosphere before sinking back into darker lanes."

The surface of the sun in motion.

Here's a bit about the technology behind it:

To observe the sun, you can’t just build a telescope the old-fashioned way. DKIST boasts one of the world’s most complex solar-adaptive optics systems. It uses deformable mirrors to offset distortions caused by Earth’s atmosphere. The shape of the mirror adjusts 2,000 times per second. Staring at the sun also makes the telescope hot enough to melt metal. To cool it down, the DKIST team has to use a swimming pool of ice and 7.5 miles of pipe-distributed coolant.

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• TWO: Capa's "The Falling Soldier" Sold:

Late last year, Sotheby's Paris sold the famous photograph "The Falling Soldier" shot by Robert Capa, hailed "the most emblematic image of photojournalism." It sold for €75,000, or just under $100,000.

Taken in 1936, it captures the last moments of a Spanish Republican fighter, in a shocking and fascinating composition. Capa made this photograph while reporting in Spain. It became famous a year later, when it was published by Life magazine in large format. Since then, many have speculated (and many have "proved") that it was a set-up image.

One of Capa's famous quotes that I like to share with students is:

     "If your pictures aren't good enough, then you're not close enough."

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• THREE: New York Times' "The Year in Pictures" for 2019:

I always like to share this because it's an important curation of photographs. Check out the The Year in Pictures 2019 by the NY Times:

St. Francis of Assisi on Artists

“He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”

- Saint Francis of Assisi

Words vs. Pictures

If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera.

-Lewis Hine

Two Thoughts on Living an Artist's Life...

First, a comic from Things In Squares:

And here's a quote from author Kurt Vonnegut (posted by The Mind Unleashed):

Mapplethorpe and Verburg on 'Perfection'

I recently came across this Robert Mapplethorpe quote:

I am obsessed with beauty. I want everything to be perfect, and of course it isn't. And that's a tough place to be because you're never satisfied.

That reminded me of something that I recently heard on an episode of "Minnesota Original" on PBS about local photographer Joann Verburg:


Direct link: https://youtu.be/SnnY3WdT_YQ

Here's a quote that starts around the 5:15 mark where Verberg talks about photographing a city in Italy:

There's a way in which in Italy I feel like I will never understand how to do it correctly, and that's very freeing. As an artist, if I think I can do it correctly, that's in my way. Whereas in Italy, I know everything I'm doing is incorrect - the way I speak Italian is dreadful - so I can be incorrect and not worry about it. What is means as an artist is that there's no right way, and I can just keep trying different things. And that's what I need to be able to do.

Those quotes aren't really related. It was just interesting to me to come across Mapplethorpe talking about how he's never satisfied because nothing is perfect, only to remember hearing Verburg a few days before saying how doing things incorrectly or imperfectly is freeing.

Inspiration

I was working in my studio last week, and I found this quote written down (and apparently I posted something like this before, about a year ago):

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.

- Chuck Close on Charlie Rose

Holga Quotes

I found a page of Holga quotes in this Holga PDF manual online: