Notes on the photographer's eye John Szarkowski

 

The invention of photography provided a radically new picture making process a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one, paintings were made - constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes - but photographs, as the man on the street put it, were taken.

 

Painting was difficult expensive and precious, and it recorded what was known to be important. Photography was easy, cheap and ubiquitous, and it recorded anything: shop windows and sold houses and family pets and steam engines and unimportant people. And once made objective and permanent, took on immortalized in a picture, these trivial things took on importance.

 

Pictures� taken by the thousands by journeyman worker and Sunday hobbyist� were unlike any pictures before them. The variety of their imagery was prodigious. Some of the new images were memorable and seemed significant beyond their limited intention. These remembered pictures enlarged one sense of possibilities and remembered they survived like organisms to reproduce and evolve.

 

The thing itself.

Photography dealt with the actual. The world itself is an artist of incomparable inventiveness and to recognize its best works and moments, to anticipate them, to clarify them and make them permanent, requires intelligent both acute and supple.

 

The factuality of pictures no matter how convincing and unarguable, is a different thing than reality itself. The subject and the picture were not the same thing.

 

Hawthorn’s Holgrave, was right in giving more credence to the camera image than to his own eyes for the image would survive the subject and become the remembered reality. He said the 19th century began by believing what was reasonable was true and would and it would end up believing that what it saw a photograph of was true.

 

The Detail

The heroic documentation of the American Civil War by the Brady group and the incomparable large photographic record of the Second World War have this in common neither explained common, without extensive captioning what was happening. The function of these pictures was not to make the story clear, it was to make it real.

 

The Frame.

The edges of film demarked what was thought most important but the subject that was shot was something else it had extended in four directions. If the photographer's frame surrounded 2 figures, isolating them from the crowd in which they stood, it created a relationship between those two figures that had not existed before.

 

Time.

That is in fact no such thing as instantaneous photograph. All photographs are time exposures of shorter or longer durations common and each describes A discrete parcel of time. Photography alludes to the past and the future only insofar as they exist in the present, the passed through its surviving relics, the future through prophecy visible in the present.

 

Immobilizing thin slices of time has been a source of continuing fascination for the photographer, and while pursuing this experiment he discovered something else: he discovered that there was a pleasure and beauty in this fragmenting of time that had little to do with what was happening. It had to do rather with seeing the moment murmured terribly patterning of lines and shapes that had previously concealed within the flux of movement. Cartier Bresson his decisive moment is not a dramatic climax but a visual one, the result is not a story but a picture.

 

Vantage point

Photography has taught us to see from the unexpected vantage point and has shown us pictures that give the sense of the scene, while withholding its narrative meaning.

 

An artist is a man who seeks new structures in which to order and simplify his sense of the reality of life. For the artist photographer, much of his sense of reality where his pictures start, and much of his sense of craft or structure, where his picture is completed, are anonymous and untraceable gifts from photography itself.

 

 

Notes from John Berger’s Understanding a Photograph.

 

Painting and sculpture as we know them are dying, because in the world as it is, no work of art can survive and not become a valuable property.

 

All works are fine art, whatever their content, whatever the sensibility of an individual spectator, must now be reckoned as no more than props for the confidence of the world spirit of conservatism.

 

By their nature photographs have little or no property value because they have no rarity value the very principle of photography is that the resulting image is not unique, but On the contrary infinitely reproducible. Thus in the 20th century terms photography or photographs are records of things seen. Our mistake has been to categorize things as art by considering certain phrases phases of the process of creation. But logically this can make all man made objects art. It is more useful to categorize art by what has become its social function. It functions as property. So photographs are mostly outside this category.

 

Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation a photograph is a result of the photographer's decision that is it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. At its simplest, the message, decoded means: I have decided that seeing this is worth recording.

 

The photograph is an automatic record through the mediation of light of a given event yet it uses the given event to explain its recording. Photography is the process of rendering observation self-conscious.

 

We must rid ourselves of confusion by comparing photography with the Fine Arts. Painting is an art of arrangement it is therefore reasonable to be demand to demand that there is some kind of order in what is arranged. This is adaptable to the painter's purpose. This is not the case with photography. Unless we include those absurd studio works in which the photographer arranges every detail of his subject before he takes the picture. Composition in the profound, formative sense of the word cannot enter into photography

 

The formal arrangement of a photograph explains nothing which then gives the photograph as photograph meaning. What makes it a minimal message I have decided that this is worth recording as large and vibrant. The true

 

The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play not with form but with time. This choice is not between photographing X&Y: but between photographing at X moment or at Y moment. The objects recorded in any photograph, from the most effective to the most commonplace, carry the same approximate weight, the same conviction what varies is the intensity with which we are made aware of the poles of absence and presence.

 

A photograph, while recording what has been seen, always and by its nature refers to what is not seen. It isolates, preserves, and presents a moment taken from a continuum. Painting interprets the world, translating it into its own language. The language in which photography deals is the language of events. All its references are external to itself hence the continuum. The only decision a photographer can take is as regards the moment he chooses to isolate.

 

A photograph is effective when the chosen moment that it records contains a quantum of truth which is generally applicable, which is as revealing about what is absent from the photograph as about what is present in it.

 

The minimal message of a photograph may be less simple than we first thought. Instead of it being: I have decided that seeing this is worth recording, we may now decode it as: the degree to which I believe this is worth looking at can be judged by all that I am willingly not showing because it is contained within it.

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Forum

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Reading the various theories and arguments that attempt to define what photography is, has been interesting. I have been through a similar experience while studying for an MSc in Research Methods for Remedial Therapists, many decades ago. One course will forever stick in my mind and was, I think, pivotal for all of us, a year long course on the history and philosophy of science. We started off by thinking that it would teach us what science does, what it actually did, was to show us what science does not do. That in the end was far more important in helping us to understand what we as researchers, were going to do.

So, I think are the arguments that (as I understand it) Snyder and Allen put forward in Photography, Vision and Representation, that there are and have been various philosophical means of defining art and photography, none of which are wholly satisfying.

 

Trying to pin down or objectively define something like ‘ART’ that is so obviously subjective is for me problematic. Too often our images are judged not by the emotional response or atheistic pleasure they give us, but by easily measurable objectives, like correct exposure and focus and who has taken them. Too detailed a definition, requiring cameras and one risks excluding a simpler form of image making, like cyanotype photography.

 

One idea that resonates for me is what John Berger says in his - Understanding a Photograph: “The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play not with form but with time. This choice is not between photographing X&Y: but between photographing at X moment or at Y moment.” An image shot either a moment earlier or later will not be the same. Henri Cartier Bresson illustrates this only too well, for me it is the difference between many good images and one great one.

 

There is a process to photography that helps me think about what I am doing, what I am producing and why. Does it matter if my way of doing photography is different from yours?

 

ME  --- the scene around me --- what I see that captures my eye --- framing the image ---

 

capturing the light --- timing --- editing --- producing a two-dimensional image with an edge/frame… showing my image --- what does it mean to you?

 

Each of us will interpret what we are seeing slightly differently, depending on our age, experience of/exposure to, education, culture, geography etc. I will try to respect what you do see in my photographs, rather than informing you what I think that you should be seeing.

 

The first image was taken in Golden Gai district of Tokyo last May. It is an area with narrow streets and tiny bars. I think that it works because it can stand alone, it does not matter if you are familiar with the area or not. The subject, for me was the girl, I saw her and wondered about her, what was her story?

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The second image is one I took of a woman I have been following for the last year. It is part of a series and I hope that it works as part of that story, but as a stand-alone image and without the context of the story I am trying to tell, it’s just a woman sitting on a bench.

 

In my project on urban farming, I will be meeting and trying to photograph a community of diverse people, I hope I can get to know them and win their trust as they work together on the land.

 

Dawoud Bey talks about and illustrates his experience of doing that in his book 'On Photographing People and Communities'. Published by Aperture.

 

He explains that each of these photographs was part of a much-worked-on project and that he gave thought to the pairings of people. He talks about his experience of going into Harlem and photographing people in their environments.

 

Another aspect of my project is the plants that will be grown and learning how to photograph them. I plan to use cyanotype photography and plant emulsions to tone the images, but this, for me is experimental at the moment.

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