Why do we make photographs? I've gone off on so many tangents in considering this work (..this work? Hell, I've been on a tangent for years)...so I figure I'll just start at the beginning.
(If you haven't read earlier posts here or on my website, then you may not know the back story...No Photoshop work has been done to these images...short of sizing and sharpening and prepping for print. The images are exactly as they were "found" - the result of recovering a failed hard drive. The files were originally individual Canon .CR2 raw data. Placed haphazardly on a portable drive used when traveling, and as a temporary backup. Many of the files within different folders actually had the same numbered naming conventions. Without more technical examination of the data, all that can be assumed is that the Data Rescue software identified multiple files with the same name and accidentally combined them into single readable (albeit, damaged and incomplete) image files...
After spending hours trying to figure out what I was seeing as I kept finding groups of files within the recovery folders that were an intense pixelated mess of color and failed image structure - like carcasses of photos- came the realization that there were as many as five different images "Frankensteined" together into one document....)
Which has led me back to the previous question...Why do we (I) make photographs? Why this question? When images you've made are inadvertently taken out of context and incidentally, accidentally, (incorrectly?) reconstituted into a beautifully broken composite of images never consciously juxtaposed (though possibly subconsciously)...by a failed piece of equipment and some software...you just gotta take a minute and consider...
From an existential (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism) point of view...every photograph made by an individual could be considered part of one long chain of related considerations. The relative "success and failure" of each image an attempt at improving upon some conceptual, aesthetic, or technical concern- as with any process being refined. But this isn't like, say, making the same object over and over again...as a mechanic perfects the process and craft of constructing the same motor over and over (which in it's own right is a fine pursuit)...The photograph is a "view" into a particular concept of place or thing or situation or condition...the decision to make a particular photo of any given subject matter, made in a particular way, in a certain light, etc. is a result of each image made before it, as well as a multitude of other considerations individual to the photographer themself...What one thinks, feels, believes...is as much a factor as the knowledge of how to use a new camera or lighting technique...(the same could be said of the process of drawing, painting, sculpture, etc) It's the "subjective" vs. the "objective" in art making- intent, and free will are called into question.
That said...as I look at these images - It's as if I'm being confronted by my own thought process...images from different times, different places..different points of experience... inadvertently combined...
I feel naive... I can see the romantic idealist..the nostalgia in the component images.....or perhaps it's more the pragmatic realist...I'm still rooted in the considerations of the early moderns ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_modernism )...but stuck on the earlier sensibilities of realism
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realism_(arts) ) ...foolishly, I think I've always subconsciously wanted photographs to be "real"...Of course this has always been the initial point of argument in regards to the medium...that it is a mechanical recording device rather than a creative tool. The idea that the camera in some way records something concrete and objective is at the root of the issue... that photographs are records/documents- but with context controlled by the photographer- the notion of "real" we realize is a false one..maybe it's more about "truth".. I'm not repeating anything here that hasn't already been much more intelligently articulated... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Photography
...but I would love to read what Sontag would have written if she had written "On Photography" in 2012.. considering that in 1977 the notion that...
"the proliferation of photographic images had begun to establish within people a "chronic voyeuristic relation"[1] to the world around them. Among the consequences of photography is that the meaning of all events is leveled and made equal."
almost seems an afterthought (but a statement even more powerful now)...an understood component of the fundamental nature of the medium. The number of photographs produced in 2012 will be in the multiple hundreds of billions... more images made than in the entire first 100 plus years of the medium. Sontag's assertion could not have been more telling...but does it still apply?
One of the key points of Sontag's examination was concerning the act of photographing, as it related to an individual's ability to "intervene"...taking the discussion to the relationship of photography to politics...
M.B.White, Eugene Richards, W.Eugene Smith, Lewis Hine, Jim Goldberg, Eggleston, Atget, Andre Kertesz, and on...each with a varying level of "editorial" consideration within their work ...There is something fundamentally important about story telling...whether the work is more visual journal or diary or consciously directed to an audience..to tell through showing is, for me what the entire process is about... I happened to pick up a camera in order to try to achieve this...The next phase of this comes to the what, how, and why and then to whom do you want to express these narratives?...Audience?
But now...with literally billions of images flooding the ether...making a photograph (for most) might be less an "act" as it is akin to a reflex...like blinking...With cameras having become nearly ubiquitous...I wonder if the term "snapshot" has any new meaning? Perhaps it's the sheer instantaneousness that is provided by "smart phones"/mobile devices, the internet, and social media that has fundamentally changed the function of the photograph...A process that once required a thoughtful attention to technical control and multiple external factors- meaning the photographer(actor) had to "choose" between considering exposure, focus, framing, etc and whether or not to enter the "burning building"...is now one that grays any divisions- where the actors and the actions - the actual execution of policy and it's affect can and has been immediately "broadcast"...The technology- in effect turns anyone with a "smartphone" and a network connection into the "documenter".
The mobile device and the internet mean that the "photographer/videographer" is NOT an individual forced to make the conscious choice to enter the war zone to "act" to record and (eventually) disseminate images of the conflict, vs. that of dropping the camera in order to take up a gun or a bandage or a pen in order to "intervene" as Sontag states...
"...perhaps originally with regard to photography, the medium fostered an attitude of anti-intervention. Sontag says that the individual who seeks to record cannot intervene, and that the person who intervenes cannot then faithfully record, for the two aims contradict each other."
...I would argue that this assertion has been made at least inaccurate in the context of the possibilities provided by new technologies...and perhaps go further (sadly, cynically) to say that the concern should not have been whether or not the photographer has the capacity to "intervene" - or now, to record while also having some affect on the outcome of given circumstances (or further that the act of recording itself could be a form of intervention)...but as to whether or not any action recorded or not - choosing to intervene or to not intervene- actually has any positive effect (meaning a direct and specific affect on policy that in some reasonable time frame that would lead to the end of loss of life, improvement of conditions, etc.). I question whether or not the act of making photographs now has any affect on outcomes. whether dropping the camera and taking up the gun accomplishing anything either... A dark place to end up...does nothing we do actually affect positive change?
http://www.thejournalismfoundation.com/2011/12/a-revolution-in-pictures-how-an-amateur-photographer-captured-the-arab-spring/
http://lightbox.time.com/2013/02/27/photographer-as-witness-a-portrait-of-domestic-violence/
..or just make it up or manipulated to represent what we want to see...or what we think others want to see...
http://www.dpreview.com/news/2013/02/25/ethics-prize-wining-photo
http://www.worldpressphoto.org/awards/2013
Whoa...how did I get here? Distilled...I guess it's a simple call to of all of us to take responsibility for our actions..perhaps further, to expect the same from others...where does this intersect with image making? It comes back to the root idea mentioned before of the "real" in a photograph...There are many ways to use the camera- considerations of subject matter, aesthetic, etc...but I think that those drawn to use the camera to tell stories have some fundamental need or a particular, (maybe subconscious) sense of responsibility - The work of Lewis Hine and other early "documentarians" as possible examples - a sense of being drawn to the experiences and events of the "everyday"- our industries and institutions. There's something to the very development of technology itself- to industrialization- that, perhaps ironically, was a self manifesting necessity. Through the same exploration and development of science and technology we created a tool that could literally show us what was happening inside a factory. On the battle field...
