DVAC Talk 2007 rev 2015
Dayton Visual Arts Center Gallery Talk
13 September 2007
Part One
One place to start might be to address the question: “Why would someone spend forty years making photographs?” How is it even possible to take an utterly commonplace, ubiquitous technology, something that requires no brains or skill, no investment of talent or learning, and devote forty years to using it in a peculiar way that very few people really care about or understand? If you look at it in an ordinary way, photography is dead simple. The question is: Should we be content with looking at things in an ordinary way? I am inclined to answer both yes and no.
I was asked not long ago, “What do you want people to get out of your work?” I responded by saying, “I don’t think what I want really matters.” People will get out of it whatever they wish. More to the point, they will get out of it whatever they bring to it, whatever they are willing to invest in it. In any case, I don’t think you make art for “people” anyway, at least not in the sense of a generic public. If you want to reach a mass audience, if you want to pitch a singular message, and if you want to elicit a particular response, it seems to me you should go into advertising.
Part Two
One of the things I like about Alfred Stieglitz, aside from his cussedness, is something that Georgia O’Keeffe once said about him: “I never knew Stieglitz to go anywhere to make a picture.” After his youthful studies in Europe, Stieglitz limited his photography to the two places in which he lived, New York City and Lake George. Eugene Atget, who may be my favorite photographer, rarely journeyed beyond the outskirts of Paris. The examples of Stieglitz and Atget strongly suggest to me that, if you can’t make a picture at home, you’re not paying attention.
I very much doubt that any artist has ever traveled to Dayton, Ohio out of aesthetic fascination, keen to make pictures of the place. Lee Friedlander, who makes pictures everywhere he happens to be, did make one here, but just because he was passing through a few decades ago. Every single Friedlander picture you will ever see is identified by a specific location: Los Angeles, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, etc. The caption for the picture he made in Dayton reads, “Somewhere in the Midwest.” He couldn’t remember!
It’s not easy to poke around in Dayton, Ohio for more than 30 years and sustain an interest in making pictures here. But I don’t think that any place is easy, at least not for very long. And it is a mistake to suppose that any place, including Dayton, remains unchanged. And if the observer himself doesn’t change over time, enabling him to discover new ways of seeing familiar things, that’s a problem in its own right. You photograph where you are, but you also photograph who you are, and neither remains exactly the same for long.
Part Three
In one of his essays, Emerson wrote, “I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; … I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.” Walt Whitman, the poet who Emerson championed so effectively, wrote in his Song of Myself, “What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me.”
I share their eagerness to embrace the commonplace, the here and now, but I think it is important to understand that these remarks were made by men who already had a deeply informed understanding of the very things they chose to set aside in order to contemplate the ordinary. Emerson ticks off a list of things he doesn’t ask for, and Whitman, in another poem, offers another list of place names and learned references, just in order to reject them. Which means they both knew enough about such things to make their lists. Sometimes it takes a good education to understand how little we know and how much there is to discover in this world that we inhabit but rarely attend to.
I don’t know if Thoreau would have agreed with Edward Abbey’s trenchant observation, “We are none of us good enough for the world we have.” But I imagine he would agree that we should at least try to be more worthy of it, and that the first and most important step in that direction is to pay attention to it. Which leads me to recall a remark by Henry Miller that, although it had nothing to do explicitly with photography, might be considered a concise way of thinking about the medium. He said, “You can’t do anything to [reality]; you can’t add or subtract, you can only become more and more aware.”
As long as I’m quoting so many people and focusing on the importance of paying attention, let me mention George Gardener’s pointed remark that, the problem with photography is that if you don’t do it well, you don’t die. And it may be that Frank O’Hara put it most clearly and forcefully when he said, “Don’t be bored, don’t be lazy, don’t be trivial, and don’t be proud. The slightest loss of attention leads to death.”
Part Four
In spite of my admiration for Stieglitz and Atget and their ability to create immensely rich bodies of work based on limited patches of real estate, and although I do a lot of work here in Dayton simply because this is, for better and for worse, where I spend most of my time, there is nothing I like better than going somewhere else to make pictures. In fact, the activity of moving through the world and engaging in a kind of interpretive dialogue with my surroundings was the thing that attracted me to photography in the first place. Working in a studio is essential for some artists who make art in a particular sanctuary every day as a form of ritual discipline. For me, however, it would be like living under house arrest.
Physicality is essential to the way in which I work. Making photographs for me is inseparable from movement, from walking around, and shifting my point of view by traveling inches or miles. I make photographs by moving my feet and using my body as much as by handling a camera. The ideal condition, as far as I am concerned, is to lose myself so completely in my work that time disappears and I am alive to everything around me. It becomes a kind of ecstatic meditation on the possible.
The slant of light for a brief moment in a particular place, the mood of the day, turning your head slightly, choosing for no apparent reason to go left instead of right, noticing how one thing aligns with another from just this angle and distance: these are the kinds of things that come into play when I make photographs. When Garry Winogrand was asked what was so great about Atget, he said that Atget always knew where to stand. We think of taking a stand as the assertion of a moral principle, a position on which we stake our integrity. In writing about Ellsworth Kelly, Michael Kimmelman says that, “His work depends on the subtlest of visual distinctions, wherein the difference of an inch in size … comes to resemble a moral choice.”
Part Five
It is perhaps all too normal to desire and acquire things. But the older I get the more I want to get rid of. One of the reasons I switched from black and white to color many years ago was that color was simpler. There were fewer options. One of the reasons I returned to black and white is because printing color in a wet darkroom became implausible in the face of the digital juggernaut. And digital photography offers infinitely more choices and complications than traditional photography ever afforded. “More choice” is the rallying cry of consumer capitalism, but we are overwhelmed by our options even as we suppose that this is a measure of our freedom. I think it is more often a web and snare of distractions.
Another reason I moved from black and white to color – and back again – is because I got to the point of knowing just what I was looking for. The margin of risk, failure, and discovery had become too small. Once you achieve a certain level of skill in solving a particular kind of problem, it’s no longer a problem. Instead, it’s just another opportunity to apply a known solution. That may be a good thing in some fields, but it is deadly for making art.
Part Six
I would like to return briefly to Emerson and a different sort of observation. He said, “ecstasy is the law and cause of nature.” Not rationality, not ruthlessness, not even selfishness, but ecstasy. I can’t say authoritatively what he meant by that, but it seems somehow right. I feel the same way about another of his curious remarks: “First, be a good animal.” Again, I’m not certain, but I take this to mean: be entirely and unthinkingly who you are, use only what you need, give everything your complete attention, and live in the present. I would also recall that Werner Herzog’s guiding interest as a filmmaker is in “ecstatic truth,” which is to say something that is true to his imagination and to his experience, rather than a verifiable equation between something that actually occurred and what we see on the screen.
Thoreau wrote in his Journal in 1852, “I have a commonplace book for facts and another for poetry, but I find it difficult always to preserve the vague distinction which I had in mind, for the most interesting and beautiful facts are so much the more poetry and that is their success.” John Berger, another writer I greatly admire, has written, “One is taught to oppose the real and the imaginary, as though the first were always at hand and the second distant, far away. This opposition is false. Events are always to hand. But the coherence of these events—which is what one means by reality—is an imaginative construction.”
The point, as I see it, is not to make a “correct” or “faithful” or “accurate” or “truthful” record of something, at least as such terms are ordinarily understood. The point is to make a kind of reference to, or model of, or allusion to something in a way that stimulates an interest primarily in the image itself and only secondarily in the thing to which it refers.
Part Seven
Photography is a matter of making choices. It is not about anything other than making choices.
A character in a play by David Hare says: “I sat down at the age of twenty-one and I thought I’m going to need some enthusiasms to get me to the grave. And I chose three: Food, sex, and socialism.” I like the absurdity of the idea that we choose our enthusiasms so deliberately. I think it takes a good many years before we begin to get a decent understanding of what enthusiasms have chosen us.
In Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Red Desert, one character says to another, “You wonder what to look at. I wonder how to live. Same thing.”
Part Eight
I am solidly with Cézanne, who said, “When I’m painting and I start to think, everything collapses.” And I like what William Carlos Williams said: “No ideas but in things.” I start by noticing something, looking at something, making some pictures, looking at pictures, being in a particular place, being open to what is around me, moving about, and generally just working visually and intuitively, seeking, finding, curious about what sort of picture might emerge from trying something out. Perhaps it’s a bit naïve, but I believe that, if you work hard enough and care deeply enough about what you are doing, if you accept the inevitability of much failure and only occasional success, and if you can find the right balance between being accepting and being critical, something interesting will happen.
Theodore Roethke said, “I learn by going where I have to go.” The trick is to figure out where we have to go, not where we are told to go or where we think we should go, but where we have to go because it is somehow essential that we get there, even when we don’t know where “there” is. And even if we pay attention along the way, every time we pause to look around, the place we are is rarely the place we thought we were headed, and the past doesn’t look like it did when we were there, and the future is just as puzzling, frightening, and compelling as it was before.
Sean Wilkinson