Photographs that choose me

[John Kasaian]

Ahhh, Paul---theres more to it than that. If you find a hundred dollar bill thats exciting, but you know darn well that isn't the way you're supposed to earn your money---its a windfall. OTOH the feeling I get when I trip the shutter on an unplanned on landscape is more like "Wow! This is the way its supposed to be!"

A photograph thats been planned and fretted over for hours(or days or months even) is more likely than not kind of "flat" to my eyes. It speaks with all the creativity of one of those business cards real estate agents have made with photographs that make them look more like movie stars or rockers than who they really are. OTOH, a scene that whispers "Hey Pal, take a picture of ME" is always sincere and the print always exhibits something genuine and satisfying.

Cheers!

[paulr]

"When you go out intentionally looking to shoot and get a 'good' shot; well, that's not really exciting ... "

I think it goes beyond getting an unexpected good shot. It's more about the kind of good shot. Anyone can learn to make certain kinds of pictures that are "good" by a given set of standards--technical, formal, or whatever. But after doing this for a while, things are going to get stale. There's only so much to be gained from making the pictures you know how to make, however competent they may be.

One of the warning signs if all of your pictures are good. It means you're coasting, playing it safe. The best artists tend to fail, and to fail often. How can you discover anything new if you're unwilling to get lost? When I lived in providence 10 years ago, I reached a point when I felt like all my pictures were good ones. At first it felt as if I'd "arrived" somehow, but then I realized a couple of things that were disturbing. One, among all these good pictures there were no great ones, And two, I was getting bored. I quickly realized it was a crisis, and I resolved it by some means that may have been unecessarily drastic ... I moved to new york, and shortly after gave up photography and became a bass player for a while.

It all eventually got me out of my rut. Now i'm back to photography, with an ever greater commitment to staying away from what's obvious and safe. I'm failing a lot, and expect to continue to do so. The next few projects i have planned are geared toward keeping me in uncharted (for me) areas. One is night pictures, which are forcing me to give up a certain amount of control. the next couple are color, which i have no experience with. They may all end up sucking, but i'm guaranteed to learn at least something from all of them.

[Mark Sawyer]

"One of the warning signs if all of your pictures are good. It means you're coasting, playing it safe. The best artists tend to fail, and to fail often. How can you discover anything new if you're unwilling to get lost?"

This has been one of the main tenets of creative photography for the last thirty years; to grow you must change and "take risks." I don't really go along with it.

Historically, the photographers who have made great contributions to the artform (at least in my mind) often went through radical changes early on, but when they found their venue, their "way of seeing," they tended to stay true to it for the rest of their careers. Adams, Weston, Cunningham, Caponigro, Cartier-Bresson, W. Gene Smith, Arbus, Mapplethorpe... all evolved and grew, but in subtle steps within their very recognizable style. Even their "great masterpieces/grand revelations" fit well within the established scope of their work.

Today, I see established artists like Uelsmann, Caponigro, Sexton, etc. continuing in the visual mode they've been in for decades. Even a radical like Witkin returns to his chosen style again and again, until his work, while unique and individual to him, becomes stylisticly predictable. And maybe that's not a bad thing; it allows one to build up a body of work which bears more weight and allows more analysis and exploration than portfolios of a dozen of this, a dozen of that...

I think we go through our big changes until we find or stumble upon our own way of seeing, and then stay with it, because, well, that's how we see things. It becomes how we work, part of who we are...

Words like "risk" and "safety" never seemed that meaningful in art, at least in my mind. Jumping quickly from one thing to another, you risk a little time, some film, some effort, and if you don't like it, you can shove it in a drawer or dumpster. A bigger risk would be to spend years or decades in one way of seeing. We might feel an adventurous departure in shooting a few sheets of film in a radically different style once in a while, and there's surely nothing wrong, and perhaps something valuable, in doing so. But as far as risk goes, we're really only playing with penny-ante stakes.

[paulr]

as an observer, you see the visual product, but not the whole process that went into it.

it's a mistake to equate ideas like taking risks with jumping quickly from one thing to another. it can be subtle. it just means being comfortable with pushing yourself outside the idea of certainty. any examination of weston's daybooks shows that he was always pushing himself, always discovering. his evolution may have been esthetically subtle, but the process for him seemed to be one of risks and uncertainties and revelations.

for a closer look at weston, look at some of the evolution that went on within his career. he went from pictorialist to formal modernist to late modernist, and then to a precursor of late 20th century landscapists. The tenor of his work went from cool and contemplative to celebratory and mystical to elegiac. He experimented throughout his career; a process that led to series like the cat pictures and the gas mask pictures that most people consider flat out failures.

Weston is actually a perfect example of what I'm talking about. I'm willing to bet you would find a similar trajectory in most of the other artists you mentioned, if you looked closer.

"But as far as risk goes, we're really only playing with penny-ante stakes."

if your connection to your art is deeper than just a hobby, the stakes never feel trivial. art is deeply personal when it's practiced rigorously. if you can say you have no fears about baring yourself through your art, then either you have evolved farther than most artists evolve in a lifetime, or you are kidding yourself.

[paulr]

i should ammend what i said ... you'll probably find a similar trajectory in the other artists you mentioned, but only over the portions of their careers during which they produced compelling work.

Adams got to a point where he let his dealers be his guide, so by the 60s he was mostly doing the same old thing. the thing that sold prints. it's this huge body of very homogenous "ain't nature grand" work that is largely responsible for him being taken much less seriously as an artist than others like Weston and Strand.

Sexton's career i don't know as well, but it strikes me that after earning a reputation as one of the first serious practitioners of color, he did nothing beyond the same old calendar photography. Which is why color pioneers like Eggleston and Harry Calahan and Stephen Shore quckly surpassed him in significance.

Caponigro I sense, like a lot of artists, ran out of steam and stopped evolving. The more recent work of his that I've seen seems to lack a lot of the life of his work from 40 years ago or so ... the work where he was actively discovering the world.

Arbus, well, she checked out after that one body of work, so we'll never know.

[Mark Sawyer]

One of the wonderful things about art is that different people can look at the same bodies of work and quite justifiably see different things...

"Caponigro I sense, like a lot of artists, ran out of steam and stopped evolving. The more recent work of his that I've seen seems to lack a lot of the life of his work from 40 years ago or so ... the work where he was actively discovering the world. "

I find Caponigro's recent work among his most exciting, in a very quiet way. Here is an artist who has achieved recognition, and in his twilight years is still working because that is what he does. He has nothing to prove, but the little still-lifes made in his small New England home studio and yard seem to quietly simplify some of the essence of the grand large works he travelled the world for in his younger days. Yes, he's running out of steam, lost some vitality, but gained something contemplative somewhere else.

Weston did much the same in his later years at Carmel. His last work there seemed a dark and quiet summary, almost a counterpoint to the reprinting of his old negatives with his sons, but a counterpoint closely related. In my eyes, Weston's vision grew and progressed but held a consistency from his return from Mexico onward. The gas mask photograph (Civil Defense) was very true to the consistancy of his vision; it's almost a formulaic Weston nude, but for a prop and title which set it apart. Even when he had something very social/political to say, he did it in a familiar way of working. Wish we could meet in a big retrospective of his work and argue it. I'm sure he'd disagree with both of us...

Adams went commercial more in the 70's, I thought, and was remarkably consistant in his visual growth through the 40's, 50's, and 60's. With his omnipresence today, it's easy to forget it was new at the time, a grand vision he worked hard to refine, and others later beat into unconsciousness, if not to death.

Sexton is much more b/w-oriented than color. He's actually a good social-experiment in photography, pursuing an avenue that most "artistic" photographers acknowledge only as a dead craft; "Oh, God, not another zone-system Yosemite landscape from a former AA assistant..." He has quite a task, perhaps impossible, finding his own voice and value in such a "pre-explored" field. He's either trying to do so in spite of it all, or just riding the commercial bandwagon. Don't know which, but there are quite a few consider him one of today's foremost photographers.

"Arbus, well, she checked out after that one body of work, so we'll never know."

And this brings it to the point. It was quite a sizeable body of work, and obviously very powerful. Had she done a dozen or two dozen and moved on to explore something new, much of that archive would not have existed, and its power as a whole would not have been there. But she maintained a remarkably consistant vision which was hers alone.

If Ansel Adams were alive and healthy and working today, and if he never fell into the traps of fame and being an icon, should he have spent the past thirty years refining it further, tyring to see what it could yet grow into? Or should he have said, well, that's enough of that, I'm doing something completely different..."

Well, it should be his decision. And our decisions about our work are ours. It's good we argue about it, so we make the decision thoughtfully. I'll still get it wrong...

[paulr]

We're arguing about something intrisic to other photographers' experience, so there's a limit to what we can know for sure. One thing we probably agree on: Weston's photographs look like Weston's, and like nothing that came before him. Same for Arbus. Same for everyone great. What these artists had to do in the beginning was show work to the world that did not look like anything previously seen as "good." Consider on top of this that they were deeply, personally connected to the work. It mattered to them. It represented how they saw the world and their place in it, and what they cared about most deeply. Their going public, with something so personal and at the same time so different, constitutes a great risk.

I see huge contrasts between these artists and some of the ones I have heard argue against risk being innate to the creative process. The latter group often produces work with the following characteristics: 1) technically impressive. 2) esthetically pleasing. 3) indistinguishable in many ways from work that preceded it by fifty to seventy years. and 4) a much better indicator of what other artists the artist admires than of how the artist sees his own place in the world, what he cares about most, what he loves, struggles with, fears, etc.

The last point is the only one that really matters. Dealing with these issues, with depth and honesty, in the forum of a publicly exhibited art, takes courage. It's also where the rewards are, and where the deepest well of greatness can be found. The risk isn't in the pursuit of novelty (although many seem to think it is). It's in exploring the unknowns of your personal experience, and being willing share your discoveries with the world.

You seem to see a summary, or a recapitulation, in Weston's latest work in Carmel. I see him looking forward, exploring the possible shapes of his own death--the ultimate exploration of the ultimate unknown. I see great courage in these images, as they themselves are powerful and fearless, and as we have reason to think they were made by a man who was increasingly weak and afraid.

[Mark Sawyer]

"The last point is the only one that really matters. Dealing with these issues, with depth and honesty, in the forum of a publicly exhibited art, takes courage. It's also where the rewards are, and where the deepest well of greatness can be found. The risk isn't in the pursuit of novelty (although many seem to think it is). It's in exploring the unknowns of your personal experience, and being willing share your discoveries with the world."

For some with more delicate egos or a need to be accepted and approved of, I can see where it is a matter of courage. But for a lot of personalities, I don't think it matters a great deal. Weston chortled over good reviews he thought didn't get his work, and others that slammed him. He had courage, but I think he was secure in his work enough that it wasn't often challenged. I think he gave himself (and us) other challenges.

"You seem to see a summary, or a recapitulation, in Weston's latest work in Carmel. I see him looking forward, exploring the possible shapes of his own death--the ultimate exploration of the ultimate unknown. I see great courage in these images, as they themselves are powerful and fearless, and as we have reason to think they were made by a man who was increasingly weak and afraid."

I see a summary, as he brought a lifetime's visual skills and insights to this work, but not a recapitulation. I'm looking through "The Last Years at Carmel" as I write this, and it strikes me that this is among his strongest, certainly most visually complex work. He seems moore at ease with his work than ever before, even having some fun of sorts, ("Good Neighbor Policy," or "Exposition of Dynamic Symmetry.") And yes, it still has that "Weston" look.

I'm still working on a unique "Sawyer" look. Maybe more dust in the film-holders...