Photography and Translation

On the Medium of Photography
A photograph is a precise coordinate on a grid of time and place. That much is plain truth. But a conventional myth is that a photograph is also the virtual equivalent of whatever is photographed. We like to think it reflects everything there is to know about what it shows. This is nonsense, of course, but it is a seductive illusionπ just the same.

We see photographs everywhere. Only rarely do we actually look at them. There are so many we could not afford the time to pay close attention to most of them, even if we wanted to. And for the most part, we don’t really want to give them even a moment’s thought. Very few were made for us to think about anyway. They were made to catch our attention, sell us something, appeal to our fantasies, jog our memories, illustrate text, or simply fill space.

If we make a conscious choice to pause and consider a photograph thoughtfully, it can provide more to think about than we might imagine. In this respect as in many others, photography has much in common with language. Both seem transparent, obvious, simple, and mundane. But they can also be complex, layered, challenging, and elusive. When they are looked into and not merely glanced at, even the most ordinary photographs or sentences reveal themselves to be remarkable human constructions.

Photography is a system for making a very particular kind of picture, a kind of picture that predates photography itself by centuries. Such pictures are made according to certain rules. When those rules are followed closely, the result is an illusion. The more skillfully the rules are followed, the more convincing the illusion.

Once we have learned to recognize and accept this illusion – which we do at a very early age – we can look at an arrangement of tones or colors on a two-dimensional surface and effortlessly imagine that we are looking onto a three-dimensional world. This is what almost everyone means when they use the word “picture.”

Photography was invented in order to make such pictures more readily, quickly, and accurately, and without the need for training and skill in draftsmanship. In other words, the goal was not to invent a new kind of picture, it was to come up with a simpler, more expedient method for making a kind of picture that the post-medieval, Western world already agreed was the only kind of picture it cared about.

So successful is photography in its ability to create these illusionistic pictures that we tend to regard a photograph as an unmediated record of something that was in front of a camera. That is to say, it seems that a photographic image is as neutral as the operations of physics that cause it to exist. When we look at a photograph we are in some ways almost unaware that we are looking at a picture at all. Instead we imagine we are looking through a window at whatever the photograph has recorded. At most we recognize that the photograph is, in effect, standing in for the thing photographed, serving as a surrogate for what it shows. In some respects we think that the more thoroughly the photograph itself disappears, leaving us with a compelling illusion of seeing through it, the better it is.

In fact a photograph is as thoroughly mediated as any other kind of picture. Every photograph is the product of countless choices, each one of which influences the pictorial result. Many of these choices are made by the designers of cameras, sensors, lenses, and software, and the makers of computers, printers, inks, and projectors. Within the framework of those decisions, we make our own choices when we make a photograph: we select where to point the camera, where to stand in relationship to what we see, what to include in the frame, and perhaps more importantly, what to exclude, when to make the exposure, and so forth. Although these decisions are often made unconsciously and in an instant, they nevertheless determine the nature of the pictures that result from them. One might say that the entire purpose of a serious photographer is to make these decisions consciously and with intent.

Photography is rooted most deeply and thrives most vigorously in the realms of pragmatism and popular culture. Thus it has always had an uneasy relationship with traditional forms of art. Of course there is a rich and highly diverse body of photographic work that has been made as art, but it amounts to only a tiny fraction of the untold billions of photographs made for other purposes.

My own work in photography has always been made within the realm of art. I mentioned earlier that I believe photography has much in common with language, so with that idea in mind I would suggest that photography made intentionally as art is not unlike using language to create poetry.

Many people think of poetry as elitist, precious, and mannered, but that is not at all what I mean. I refer to poetry in this context because it is condensed, layered, both oblique and direct simultaneously, and capable of subtle readings. I think that good photographs can have the same characteristics. In both poetry and photography the medium itself is commonplace; it is used everywhere by everyone, and it is used overwhelmingly for mundane, utilitarian purposes. Poetry, after all, shares a vocabulary with daily speech and newspapers. Photography as art uses the same technology that is used to make snapshots and advertisements, wedding pictures and high school portraits.

Li Bai

Here is a poem by the 8th century, Tang dynasty poet Li Bai:

静夜思
李白

床前明月光，
疑是地上霜。
举头望明月，
低头思故乡。

Here are two translations of this poem:

“Thoughts on a Still Night”

Before my bed, the moon is shining bright,
I think that it is frost upon the ground.
I raise my head and look at the bright moon,
I lower my head and think of home.

“Night Thoughts”

Bright moonlight before my bed
Seems like frost upon the floor;
I raise my head and watch the moon,
Then lower it down and think of home.

Translations are always compromises. Some would argue they are always corruptions. There are many other translations of this poem, but I hope these two do some justice to the original.

On Translation
A translation is not a copy or a mirror image. It must communicate more than the literal content of words. It must convey implied and embedded meanings as well. It must include not only what the original says, but also what it suggests and evokes. This cannot be reliably communicated by dictionary definitions of words taken one at a time. The translator must understand the context, the sense, the overtones and undertones, of what is being said. The challenge is to find an approximate equivalent to the essence of the original in new words that bear a similar meaning in another culture.

This requires more than an intimate understanding of both languages. It requires the skill and the confidence to make creative choices. Translation, I would argue, is not a job for purists so much as it is for poets. It requires sensitivity to sound and texture and rhythm and mood as much as it requires a mind like a bilingual thesaurus and a sure command of grammar. In other words, the good translator seeks a relationship not so much of literal exactitude as one of resonant correspondence. All translations are also interpretations.

The translator’s responsibility is to be faithful to the original, to the author’s intent and culture and meaning. But he or she is equally responsible for ensuring that the author’s work is accessible and meaningful and reasonably intact when it is taken in by someone through the medium of another language. This is the translator’s supreme, and in some ways impossible, challenge.

I would add that photographs are also not copies or quotations or mirror images, no matter how much we might like to believe otherwise. Photographs are translations and interpretations. But unlike a text, the “original” with which the photographer works has no fixed meaning, and there is no authorial authority that the photographer must respect. The photographer, unlike the translator of texts, is free to use the “original” material to his own ends.

When information travels from one language, or medium, or culture to another, it is inevitably altered. This alteration will occur by default, but it may also be done with intention, and it is the job of the thoughtful translator to be as intentional and as aware of options and opportunities as possible. In other words, the translator must accept the role of interpreter, for it is impossible to translate without interpreting.

I emphasize the point that translation and interpretation are not at issue exclusively in verbal language, in moving text or speech from Mandarin to English or Sanskrit to Swahili. Translation and interpretation are deeply embedded in every aspect of human activity. Everything we think and experience and learn is constantly in transition from one state to another. Translation is the medium through which this transition takes place, and interpretation is both the process and the product of translation.

Li Bai’s Poem and Photography

Li Bai ‘s poem is very simple and direct. He tells us what he sees in clear, plain language. Yet because it is a poem, and we recognize it as such, we know it is doing more than describing moonlight. His brief account is meant to evoke certain responses in the reader. And we are alerted to that expectation by the fact that this account appears within a structure that we recognize as a poem. There are no words in the poem that are unusual, or that would not be used in normal, daily conversation. But because they are put together in a particular way, and because we assume there is a purpose behind their construction, they have an effect that transcends routine communication.

A photograph made as art may also – and usually does – use plainspoken, straightforward description and addresses ordinary things. But whereas we can usually recognize a poem by its structure and appearance, a photograph made as art, unless it is framed and hung in a gallery, looks essentially just like any other photograph.

I hasten to add that, just because a photograph – or work in any other medium, including poetry – is presented as art does not mean it is good or interesting or worth spending time with. The vast majority of work in every medium is mediocre at best. Only a very small percentage of the poetry and art that comes into the world is really good. (And I am simply passing over the extremely complex business of defining what one means by “good” in the first place.) My real point is that photography is, in some important ways, more akin to language than to any other medium, and that photography made as art is related in some ways to the position of poetry.

While photography as art covers a wide spectrum of concepts and kinds of imagery, I should be clear that my own work is very much within the tradition of straightforward photographic representation. With one obvious exception that I will point out, I do not manipulate my images in any way that causes them to look significantly different from what I saw in the camera. I select a particular point of view and I use the frame very carefully. I make simple, conventional, photographic adjustments of focus, exposure, contrast, color correction, and the like. I have always been strongly attracted to the apparent directness of photography, to its singular similarity to the simple act of pointing. I am aware of the various ways in which this concept can be deconstructed, but I prefer to abide by it just the same.

Within this tradition of photography, it is literally in the camera that the photographer defines his subject. It is easy to misunderstand this statement. Most people assume that the subject of a photograph is whatever was in front of the camera. In other words, the subject matter of a picture would seem to most viewers to be its subject. But if we think more deeply, we will understand that subject matter is one of many resources a photographer uses in order to define the subject of an image.

If you want to make an image that expresses love or suffering, mystery or beauty, joy or fear, comedy or tragedy, outrage or tranquility, irony, wit, reverence, or insight, you know you cannot point a camera at such things. All you can do is find something that, when photographed in a certain way, might suggest to a viewer what you had in mind, what you felt, what you hoped to embody in an image that someone else might encounter and find what you invested in it. This in turn requires viewers willing and able to understand photographs on such terms, in other words, people who can discern that the subject matter is related to, but not the same as, the subject. Returning for a moment to Li Bai, although it is clear that the subject matter of this selected poem was moonlight, the subject of the poem was the experience of feeling alone, far from home. The thing described is like a signpost or a map, & should not be confused with the place it indicates.