Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn’t attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don’t see.
Emmet Gowin
Photography, any visual art for that matter, but photography in particular is about learning to see. Everyone looks but not everyone sees. What is the difference? Looking is indiscriminate in the sense that looking takes in everything without attending to anything in particular. Seeing is the learned practice of attending, of paying close attention to not only what is present in its origins but, and this is most important, attending to what the photographic image will look like when finished. Seeing involves both the here and now and the ability to project to the finished product.
Learning to see is a process that requires patience, intuition, and a degree of talent in that order. If one is impatient no amount of practice will suffice to turn the corner from looking to seeing. Patience does not mean one does not get frustrated, rather, it suggests that frustration is a tool for learning, a part of the process of making images and is taken in stride. Intuition, especially at the beginning of the transitional process, is a tool that, when applied, tends to push the transition forward. Intuition is nothing more than experimenting with camera and subject, paying close attention to what one is doing and focusing on the results as a learning experience. It is helpful to have others critique your work at this stage as a way of challenging your intuition either confirming your choices or suggesting other ways to handle the same ideas. Finally talent, the least important element in the process. Yet without talent one stands little or no chance of ever developing photographic vision. Raw talent may be nurtured, developed, challenged to improve but without the raw elements in place there is little one can do to teach one to see.
Wupatki National Monument Backcountry No. 2 ~ Winter 2010
Photography is a human act and therefore subjective, a selective act and there interpretive. This makes it possible for photography to be an art, for photographers to achieve a personal style – and for the camera to lie.
Arthur Goldsmith
On one count, and one count only, Goldsmith, while not entirely wrong, is far too bombastic for my taste. The camera does not lie, the camera is the photographer’s tool for re-presenting that which conforms to the vision to his or her vision. Much like memos that bear the slogan, From the Desk of…, (I cannot think of a time when a desk wrote a memo) placing blame on the camera is a bit much.
Having written on the idea of interpretation, of re-presenting, of selection, and at the risk of some degree of repetition, what makes the photographic image potentially something we label as art is the input of the photographer and not the photographer’s equipment. First and foremost, the photographer brings a point of view to that which is being photographed. Choices that conform to the photographer’s vision are made that no other photographer can or would make at any given moment in time. Post exposure processing also contributes to the character of the final image presented as a finished product, an artifact of place that discloses something of the photographer to a viewer.
I do not wish to suggest that every viewer of a photographic image will take away the same experience as other viewers of the same image. To the contrary, viewing an image is as potentially creative as making the image in the first instance. Meaning is constructed by the viewer based on an entire set of experiences from the lived experience. Every viewer, therefore, carries an entire set of ideas about what to look for in an image. If one is unaware of the photographer’s ideas, if one comes to an image fresh, ideas about the meaning of the work may be all over the place. If, on the other hand, the life and ideas of the photographer are well known, the chances that viewers will be able to find correspondence between their own interpretative ideas and the ideas of the image maker. That is one reason I undertook the task of not only posting an image a day for a year but to write about my ideas about the nature of photography itself and where it stands as an art form. Learning more about me is one way to see my images more clearly.
Still images do stay with us and particularly if we have a long time to look at them, and if they get repeated. That kind of reinforcement really burns something into the mind and that’s what happens with photographs because they are infinitely reproducible, they are infinitely reproduced!
Vicki Goldberg
Before photography there was only memory to make impressions on one’s mind. There was the place and, if one was fortunate enough to see such a place, there was a trace left behind of a continuum of exposure to the infinitely brief moment that began to fade only moments after it was imprinted somewhere in one’s mind. Existence is brief and one’s exposure to existence is even briefer. What appears as a lifetime is a series of trace impressions, some stronger than others and some that simply disappear.
Photography changed all that. Certainly the process of acquiring trace memories has not changed. One sees something and a trace is imprinted. The photographic image, however, like the printed word, allows one to return again and again to the image in order to reinforce the existing trace. The photograph is an artifact of its very origins. When one looks at a photograph of some place, one is embedding a trace of the photographic image and not of the place of origin. The photographic image is removed from its origins in a number of ways, not the least of which is that the photograph compresses four dimensions into two. The photograph is a flat simulacrum of the world that once existed but is no longer. The photograph is, perhaps, a permanent record of the trace of vision captured by a particular photographer at a particular time and place.
The photographic image, as a reproducible, contains a mere trace of the place of origin. a trace that can not nor will not ever be repeated with exactitude. But the image itself may be reproduced any number of times so as to provide a broad audience for an artifact of a place of origin. I have, for example, never been to Paris yet, through the eyes of Eugene Atget I have come to know Paris, or at least a version of Paris that was recorded by Atget as reproduced by Berenice Abbott. This exposure does not take the place of a trip to Paris yet it embeds the knowledge as told by a set of artifacts about a place that once was in a way that makes it all seem so real. The photographic image is, in this sense, one level removed from the place itself, a step away from that which is and is always already replaced by the next moment, yet presenting a permanence that belies its own transitory origins.
Main Pueblo Ruins at Wupatki National Monument ~ Winter 2010
Photographs now speak in an eloquent way about the nature of vision itself. The philosophical implications of sight, of being able to see the world in three-dimensional terms, becomes very important within the context of the artistic photograph. The riddle of space and time is somehow stated with a little bit more clarity by virtue of seeing in-between the heartbeats.
Ralph Gibson
The ruins at Wupatki are a but a trace of a thriving culture living on the Colorado Plateau as little as 800 years ago. This photograph of the ruins re-presents both an artifact of the existence of these ruins in 2010 as an image sliced from time and frozen in two dimensions and a trace of my seeing of the ruins on a particular day at a particular moment in four dimensional time and made available for others to see how I see.
The first time I saw these ruins, now over 40 years ago, I was a graduate student in history with an interest in the clash of cultures along the Spanish Borderlands. My sympathies rested with the Native populations as resistors to Spanish domination. At Wupatki, an amazingly intricate pueblo, I reasoned that one could not be anything but impressed by the accomplishments of the builders of this pueblo. Not much is known about the people populating these rooms. They are referred to as either the Anasazi (ancient ones in Navajo) or the Sinagua. More likely, the pueblo represents a melding of several cultures…but there the trail ends. All that remains are these ruins and some pottery shards and at least one photographic image (of course there are many, many more). Over the years I never pass up the chance to visit these ruins or this rich volcanic soil just outside of Flagstaff, Arizona.
Over the past 40 years, I managed to carve out perhaps ten days, some 240 hours visiting this place. I managed to capture around 30 images, half of which were lost in a basement flood. All told, I have a living record of Wupatki of 15 images, a record amounting to 0.06 seconds (0.12 seconds if I include the lost images and their negatives). Seeing the world between heartbeats is a metaphor that captures the essence of the nature of the photographic image. The camera is a tool that allows me to focus my gaze on that which is of interest and, in the final analysis, lets me capture the briefest slices of time to re-present a trace or two of my visual memory for sharing with others.
It is either there, or it is not. This means to stop pretending and to stop making excuses for what you wish were there, for what you felt at the time, and for what is not in the photograph. The “it” must be present in the subject to be in the photograph. So, it’s either there, or it’s not. Period. Only trouble is, how do you know what the hell “it” is? Especially if you’ve never seen it before? This is my big insight after the first ten years of trying to find out exactly what constitutes a still photograph. Sometimes simple propositions have the most profound implications.
Priscilla Ferguson-Forthman
Making photographs is, to a large extent, a visual compromise between the origins and the print. Technique will only take one so far; an internalization of the craft contributes to the ability to record what is there in the landscape, what presents itself for capture. Craft alone, however, makes for boring images. Wedded to one’s craft is the ability to see, to gaze with purpose at that which is right in front of one’s nose, so as to allow one to re-present that which one sees, something that goes well beyond the mere presence of something to be photographed.
The image in this post, Mather Point just as the sun is a sliver of intense light just above the horizon, is an example of one’s ability to see beyond that which is merely there, to a point of re-presenting what I saw as transferable to the final print. The warmth of the light in the sky, a light which has not yet permeated into the canyon below but a light which illuminates the tops of a few features in the canyon the rest still covered in shadow, that is the image I saw, the image I chose to photograph.
The art of photography is the ability to see how light and shadow play against each other, to gaze at a landscape and, by relying on one’s craft, transfer that which one sees to the finished photographic image. That is the difference between taking a snapshot and constructing a photographic image.
The more one looks, the more one sees. And the more one sees, the better one knows where to look.
Tielhard de Chardin
When I first began seriously making images I shot everything I could find in my viewfinder. A roll of PlusX lasted but minutes; I knew when I was finished because I had no more film. The simple truth was I had no vision, no means of seeing beyond the surface where everything looked interesting indiscriminately. Every once in a while I might find an image I really liked but they were few and far between. Those early years were important because I spent time looking, both in general and specifically through the viewfinder of my camera. I began to discriminate, to frame images more carefully, ignoring some potential images and concentrating on others. Still I was only looking in the broadest sense of the word.
That all came to an abrupt halt when, in high school, I signed up for photography as an elective class my freshman year. On the first day in class we sat through a series of slides of iconic images, discussing each one in terms of how the image stands alone and how it relates to the images that preceded the one in question. At the end of the discussion we were given an assignment to photograph “flat.” No one had a clue. The class met three days each week and the assignment was due on Friday. Wednesday we spent time learning elementary darkroom techniques and how to develop a roll of 35mm film.
I spent the next several days trying to figure out what photographing “flat” meant? Then it dawned on me that all I had to do was go out and look so, camera in hand, I began to look for something “flat.” By Thursday afternoon I wasn’t sure I could complete this assignment when I looked down and there at my feet was a maple leaf that fell from a nearby tree. It stood alone against the sidewalk and I suddenly had the idea that this was “flat.” I shot the image, got to school early Friday morning and developed the roll of film containing several views of the leaf and sidewalk. By lunch the film was dry and I returned to the darkroom and printed one image. By the time class met I had an image to share with the class. Over the hour of class time we looked at the images of “flat” that we all produced, critiquing and learning from the experience of creating images from this simple assignment. This was my first experience at learning how to see while looking. Then next assignment was to photograph motion…a whole different story.
Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Learning to see in a photographic sense means that one has acquired skills that lead directly to what Cartier-Bresson called the decisive moment. One must learn to gaze patiently at the whole of what one chooses to photograph. One must also learn to reduce one’s gaze into a frame, a ratio of width to height, that results in a pleasing composition. One must also further reduce ones frame into a precise moment of action, that moment within the continuum of moments to capture an image on film or, to be more precise, to a digital file. Finally, one must learn to seamlessly apply one’s gaze to the equipment one chooses to use but this is the least important part of the process.
To gaze is to engage with one’s setting, to concentrate on the whole of one’s surroundings in a way that appears to block all interference, all distractions from one’s act of looking. The gaze is akin to a meditation in which one empties one’s mind in order to reach a deeper understanding of that which is. To gaze is to gain a certain patience, waiting for conditions to merge into a moment of precision when everything is just so. To gaze is to see beyond merely looking, to hone an awareness of everything in order to select that which is to be photographed.
While gazing, one learns to frame in a photographic sense, to look through a ratio of width to height, as a part of the selection process for making photographs. The frame one chooses as a means to reduce the whole into a potential photographic image is dependent upon the equipment one is using at any given time. If one is using a 4×5 or 8×10 view camera the frame ratio is 2 to 2.5. If, as I now do, one is using a digital 35mm camera the common ratio is 2 to 3. Framing requires a specific knowledge of one’s equipment but is independent of the viewfinder in the sense that one does not look through the viewfinder until one has already made a selection of something to photograph. Framing narrows one’s gaze as a first step in making a photograph.
Once one makes a framing selection the time for action begins. Depending upon how one shoots, one must set up one’s camera. When shooting landscapes I continue to use a tripod as if I were shooting with a large format camera. This allows me to be precise in my framing selection as I finally look through the viewfinder to compose the image. It is at this stage that one’s vision merges with one’s technical knowledge in order to select the appropriate ratios between ISO (film speed), shutter speed and lens speed in order to capture the image one sees. Here the combination between vision and craft allow one to capture an image that is always already gone, one never to be seen again and never having been seen prior, the unique decisive moment of exposure.
The image in this post is an example of the application of the gaze to the whole of one’s surroundings. I was photographing at Yavapai Point in the Grand Canyon at sunrise on a very cold Winter morning in January. I set up in an out of the usual beaten path in order to not be disturbed by the small crowd gathering around at this lookout. I captured a number of images from the moment of the break of the sun over the horizon behind me to when the shadows began to shorten. I packed up and was on my way back to my car when I turned a corner and there it was, the full moon around 30 degrees above the horizon above the canyon wall. I stopped, set up the tripod, adjusted the camera and released the shutter. The light was still quite warm, the time being around 8:30 AM. As I was setting up many of the people that came to watch the sunrise over the canyon were walking back to the parking lot. I heard one person say, “I wonder what he is shooting?” I suspect this remark was made to someone other than me. I thought, this is the difference between gazing and merely looking.
There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.
Ernst Haas
In late December I was in Phoenix visiting my 11 year old grandson. He has an interest in photography and asked me to help him learn something about making pictures. Off we went on a journey of discovery. I gave him a few assignments, a digital camera with a normal lens and we each went off shooting. He lives directly across the street from Chase Field, home of the Arizona Diamondbacks so we decided to look for pictures around the field. The image in this post was shot in response to an assignment I gave him to find form in the city. Like most beginners, he wants to shoot the whole thing, to capture all there is to be seen. Early in the day I told him to shoot everything twice. First, shoot what he sees and then take three steps closer to his subject and shoot again. When we were critiquing images at lunch and he saw this image of a Palm Tree Trunk located directly in front of his building he said, “Oh, now I understand, get closer Poppa, get closer.”
Learning to see is, to a large extent, learning to eliminate the unnecessary from the image being photographed. I like to think that making photographs is an ongoing process of editing from the initial gross level of framing the image to the final production in which one edits for the purpose of fine tuning a final image to re-present an artifact of one’s trace of an exposed existential moment; an interpretation of one’s vision.
My goal as a photographer is to re-present the world as only I see that world. One might conclude that there is an arrogance in voicing such a goal, a self-importance bordering on hubris. I, on the other hand, argue that the goal of capturing the world as only I see it is a recognition of one’s unique vision in a world filled with unique visions. Let me tell a story to illustrate my point. A number of years ago I was in Victor Colorado participating in a workshop for photographers. I shot many images during the ten days I was there. I processed some of the film I shot in Victor, but the majority of the film was processed back in my studio when I returned home. While in Victor I traded a couple of images with a friend. One afternoon, while printing some of the images I shot in Victor I kept thinking that one of the images I was processing, one I liked very much, was oddly familiar. As it turns out, one of the images I traded for was (and still is) hanging in my house. It was an image of the very same scene. Needless to say, the images were quite different in their interpretation of the same. It seems that Peter and I stood in nearly the same place, looking out at the same town, at the same mountains, on a cloudy day. Peter’s image emphasized the storm rapidly approaching while mine, shot using infrared black and white film, focused on the town that once was but is no longer. Two photographers, each with a different vision, shooting the same subject yet telling two quite different stories about the place being photographed.
Arrogance is found in the comparison of the two images claiming mine to be better. That would be a fool’s errand. Humility, on the other hand, is found in the recognition that both images are solid examples of visual story telling. I am enriched by the experience of seeing the world, a world I photographed as well, through Peter’s eyes, through his unique vision. I keep Peter’s photograph hanging on my walls, not only because I like it, but because it reminds me that we all see differently, we all tell overlapping yet distinct stories through our visual gaze.
I think the equipment you use has a real, visible influence on the caracter of your photography. You’re going to work differently, and make different kinds of pictures, if you have to set up a view camera on a tripod than if you’re Lee Friedlander with handheld 35 mm rangefinder. But fundamentally, vision is not about which camera or how many megapixels you have, it’s about what you find important. It’s all about ideas.
Keith Carter
I have been making photographs since I was 13 years old, some 53 years ago, when I discovered magic in the darkroom as images appeared as negatives on film and positives on photographic paper right before my eyes. I have used everything from a Brownie Hawkeye fixed lens snapshot camera to an 8 x 10 view camera in my image making journey. I switched to digital image making about 5 years ago when it became clear that there was nothing I could do in a darkroom that I couldn’t do in my newly discovered Lightroom, in fact, digital image making offered me additional technique that was superior to wet process, not in the final outcome but in the ease of achieving that outcome. Digital imagery has also made color more available as an art form in photography.
Today I shoot with Canon cameras with Tameron lenses. My workhorse camera is the 5D with a 28-105mm f 2.8 lens set on a tripod. I also shoot with a 30D and, when in extreme need, a Rebel XLI. In the field I generally carry two cameras. The 5D is tripod mounted with the 28-105 lens. I carry the 30D on a strap with a 70-200mm f 2.8 lens for closeup bokeh technique, a technique that focuses on a single piece of the image while letting the background to fade into a blur. As a general technique while shooting landscapes I use a High Density Range (HDR) technique. I expose three images bracketed between 3 stops to 5 stops, depending on the dynamic range of the light, in order to expose for all aspects of the image: shadow, highlight and midtones. These three images are then combined and registered using my computer so that one sees detail across all aspects. The result is an image that conforms to my vision while exposing the image.
In the final analysis, however, all this technique, whether I shoot digital or film, use an expensive piece of equipment or a camera phone, makes no difference if I am unable to see. Photography is about seeing and seeing is about vision. One learns to concentrate one’s gaze while in the field, to look for images that, for whatever reason, resonate with correspondence to one’s notions of the surrounding universe. One learns through experience to separate the ordinary from that which corresponds to one’s visual understanding of the place of origin and only then does one take the time and put in the effort to expose an image. Visual ideas emanate from the core of one’s lived experience and inspire one’s own creative journey. Not a day goes by when I do not think about what I see; I take this response-ability quite seriously. I translate this thinking into photographic images of places and of things creating artifacts of the traces of my lived experience.
Photography is a medium, a language, through which I might come to experience directly, live more closely with, the interaction between myself and nature.
Paul Caponigro
Photography has developed my ability to see, to look at, to gaze, to directly experience the moment of existence that confirms the exteriority of the Absolute Other while scratching at the door of the infinite that bookends existence. The photograph which captures a finite moment, a bounded instant of time as a linear continuum, a recorded trace, an unchanging remembrance of that which once was, a fixed artifact of otherwise fading memory of lived experience, is a record of one’s encounter with an otherwise impossible confrontation with origins compressed into a flat, two-dimensional re-presentation of a particular moment which is always already impossibly and irredeemably lost.
To encounter the world in this manner, gazing outwardly to capture that which was is akin to the historians’ grasp of factual yet incomplete knowledge of the past. Photographs are always incomplete records of an otherwise larger visual context. Photographers play with the whole by disregarding parts, framing something visually compelling while leaving out distractions and otherwise visually disturbing elements from the unity of the four corners of the photographic image itself. In this sense, the photograph is an incomplete record, a record of the photographer’s vision and not of the origins of place.
A picture, it is said, is worth a thousand words. The underlying assumption is that the photographic image is accurate in its descriptive qualities, a truth machine that presents unquestionable and straight forward evidence of that which is photographed. I argue that this underlying assumption is false. As a photographer, my encounter with the context in which I am photographing is influenced by the experiences of my own lived experience. I am influenced by my schooling, my parenting, the friends I had and have, the political focus of the times in which I live and have lived, the religious and cultural exposure I have had and so on. In short, the sum total of my lived experience to this very moment influences the way I gaze at the world in which I live. My photographs are interpretations of the very personal encounters I have with the environment while I am photographing. Each photograph I make is influenced by my lived experience and each photograph I make contributes to the ever developing and ever changing lived experience. I am caught up in the circle of experience while choosing to collect artifacts of my personal vision, of fixed traces of experience that are then made available to others to view.
The more I photograph in nature, the closer I feel to the essential qualities of my lived experience. I have come to understand that I live in a universe that exposes itself to me in infinitely small traces of existence that, once exposed, are always already gone, replaced by another trace leaving the impression of linear time. While I cannot deny the existence of time, I understand my own lived experience as suspended by this encounter with the infinitely brief moment of awareness, the existential moment, all else is constructed of trace memories or projections into future events, neither of which exists anywhere else but in my mind. My life is sandwiched between two infinities bounded by birth and death; my lived experience is a celebration of the exteriority of the Absolute Other exposed through the encounter of the existential moment. How improbable it is that I am here, but here I am working as a photographer recording that which I love leaving behind permanent recordings, records of my vision, artifacts of the trace of the existential moment.
With permission, you may use images published in this blog for non-commercial purposes so long as you do not alter the image in any way and you attribute proper credit to Roger Passman with a link to this blog.
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February 8, 2010 1828 Jules Verne 1925 Jack Lemmon 1928 Sir Stanley Baker 1936 Clive Swift 1931 James Dean 1932 Lady Howe 1932 John Williams 1941 Nick Nolte 1955 John Grisham
