A year or so ago a friend of a friend asked me to
be a guest speaker at the beginning photography class that he was teaching at a
small local college. He, the teacher, is
not a photographer but instead was a freshly minted MFA and adjunct faculty
member of their fledgling art department.
He felt that having a real live photographer talk to the class, show
some work, and participate in the class critique of the student's assignment
for the week would be a good idea. I
agreed to do so and it turned out to be a lot of fun. I spoke about why I do the work I do, how I
do it, whose work I admire and why, and how I get my work shown. The class was about evenly divided between
students who needed a liberal arts credit and students who were really
interested in photography.
Near the end of the Q&A session following my
talk one of the latter, a young woman who had already asked several perceptive questions
asked: "Have you read Barthes?" (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida). I allowed that I had, indeed, taken a run at
it several years ago but had found it nearly impenetrable and had given up on
about page 10. My answer elicited a
growl of agreement from the class so I enquired why she asked that
question. It turned out that they had
been assigned to read Camera Lucida as an introduction to the
appreciation of photography as an art form.
Their instructor, looking a bit sheepish, allowed that the class had
found it to be a difficult read.
Time passed.
I happened upon a copy of Camera Lucida in
a used book store for a dollar and decided, with 20 or so additional years of
reading about photography under my belt, that I would take another shot at
it.
Yep, it is a difficult read. This time, however, I soldiered through to the
end. Here's my synopsis:
Photography has a unique ability to record what
something or somebody looked like at a specific time and place. This gives it the power to be a window into
the past that no other visual art has.
Some photographs are interesting, even compelling simply because of
their historical, cultural, or anthropological content. Others, less common, are fascinating beyond
that. The latter photographs have a
property that isn't related to specific subject matter or photographic style
because they are scattered through many genres and many photographer's
works. He would like to discuss these
two attractions to certain photographs using the methods and vocabulary of
philosophy but can't figure out how to do so even though he has given them
borrowed Latin names. Since the methods
of philosophical discourse don't seem to work his next strategy is to examine
some photographs that exhibit the latter and try to infer the general from the
specific.
At this point, about 40 pages into the book, I
was pretty excited about it -- apart from the fact that he took 40 or so pages
of very convoluted text to get through the paragraph above. I, too, feel that some photographs have some
property that I cannot articulate that makes them very special. I, too, have examined every photograph I find
that I feel possesses this magic quality (which my friend Bryan calls foo-ness
– see the footnote) and
have attempted with very limited success to infer the general from the
specific.
Several days later I picked up Camera Lucida and
opened it to the bookmarked page (page 90) and read the lead sentence of the
first paragraph: "I can put this another way." The words that popped into my mind were:
"Oh, please don't! Spare
me!" In the intervening pages
he had described a variety of photographs that
move him deeply and concluded that they do so because of some detail,
often trivial, in them that related to his own life experience -- a landscape
(urban or rural) in which he feels he could habitez, more like
"inhabit" than "live there". In the case of a James Vanderzee portrait of
a family, one of the women is wearing a necklace that reminds him of one that
his mother wore. These connections are,
of course, intensely personal and he opines that there must be something more
universal.
He then went through an exhausting (not
exhaustive) examination of a series of photographs of his mother ending up with
a snapshot of her at about age five and winds his way back to what he started
with in the introduction -- photography is unique in the art world because it
works only if the photographer (operator) aims the camera at the subject
(referent) and pushes the button at a specific instant. [Obviously, he did not consider the work of
Jerry Uelsmann.] By so doing the
photograph opens a window into the past.
In the final 30 or so pages, he continued to
belabor the notion of a photograph as a window into the past and as a reminder
of death either already happened or yet to come. This is an issue I sometimes think of: "This
lovely young woman was dead before I was born." However, his "This was but is no
more." while true hardly seems like a pivotal reason why photography
is different from every other visual art form.
In 119 pages (less a few pages of photographs) of
very dense and convoluted text he has looped back to what he stated in the
introduction with the sole addition of the memento mori reference to the
photograph as a reminder of death.
Moreover, contrary to my going in opinion (at
page 40) that he was trying to track down the properties that make specific
photographs "special" while others are not his goal was to uncover
the universals that make all photographs different from other visual art
mediums. Moreover, he is attempting to
wrap words around something (he was a professor of lexicology, after all) that
I am convinced is essentially visual -- that may not even have words to
describe it -- and that's ok with me.
I'm glad I slogged through this swamp but it is
clearly a Bryan
Photography has the
unique ability to show what something or somebody looked like at a specific
time and place. The only hard bits in
photography are which way to point the camera and when to push the button.
---------------------
*About foo-ness:
The term "foo" originated, as far as I
know, in the absurdist comic strip Smokey Stover -- although the strip's
author, Bill Holman, contended that it means "good luck" in
Chinese. Smokey was a fire-fighter (foo
fighter). I wonder if the members of the
post-grunge band, Foo Fighters, know about Smokey or were even born when the
strip was current.
Holman made a serious but ineffectual effort to
introduce "foo" into the English language, perhaps inspired by the
possibly apocryphal story about a wag who introduced "quiz" into
English overnight by hiring urchins to write the word on walls all over Dublin
When I began trying to identify the mysterious
properties that made a few photographs so extremely compelling, my friend Bryan
suggested that the property was obviously "foo-ness" -- important but not yet defined, perhaps indefinable.
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