Photography Discourse: Aiming Higher

Change happens in the mind.

The state of discourse in photography is just abysmal. In the elitist circles of hallowed institutions and academic milieus the prevailing premises of forty or even fifty years ago still dominate discussion. In online commentary, bros in baseball hats criticise bros for wearing watch caps. Students in photography programs aren't given anything more current to grapple with than Sontag and Barthes. Is this really the best we have to offer? Is this really what such an interesting and relevant medium's practitioners think is going to advance anything? While self-appointed guardians of purity argue about formats, materials, capture technology, and cling to hypocritical ethical judgments that fail to point a way toward more powerful work, what are we really accomplishing? And who actually cares?

I work with dozens of photographers each year to try and help them grow. What each of them needs is different, and for sure there are a segment of them who have a confused idea about what their growth requires, but in my time as a teacher I have seen more and more that almost all advancement happens in the mind. Your ideas and understanding change and the photographs you make will change accordingly. As you shed less meaningful concerns you open the door to the ideas that guide you towards freedom. Sometimes it happens from the outside in. You make some pictures that challenge your assumptions, that offer you some evidence of your limiting beliefs, and your idea of the target changes. Then you make more. Either way, the intellectual change drives the growth.

It all begins with questions, and the values you choose to hold dear. My questions have changed drastically over the years. At first I just wanted to understand how to make a "good" picture. It was as simple as that. Then it became how to make pictures that were recognizably mine, that demonstrated a personal voice. Nowadays I'm more concerned with directing that voice into freer states of vulnerability and deeper levels of feeling. The answers don't come easily, but we make it harder on ourselves when we remain attached to binary dilemmas and get caught up in distractions.

In photo schools there's way too much emphasis on craft. I'm not saying craft is irrelevant, and of course it wouldn't make a lot of sense for a school to not offer instruction in darkroom printing, lighting, and digital processing, but I think the make-or-break issues when it comes to a photograph are rarely about craft, or technical prowess. I have seen students whose craft was impeccable and had nothing to say. I've seen students master studio lighting or flash and then fail to use their knowledge in any meaningful confrontation with the world. I've seen photographers who are deep in the weeds of alternative processes, but whose work is sleeping through a storm. Photography has never been easier. Modern technology puts the craft nerd and the iPhonographer into the same arena, and neither set of tools guarantees the pictures will matter. If I make a really boring piece of music and record it on tape instead of a hard drive, it's still lame. If someone writes a poem that compels you to want to change your life, I guarantee you it isn't because the poet had a mastery of known forms of iambic and trochaic schemes. Correctness and neatness don't stir the soul, and aren't we here to wake each other up? We want someone to look at our photographs in astonishment at the miracles and mysteries life holds, don't we? What the hell do we have a medium for?

For some, the pain of not having an answer morphs rapidly into careerism. They dress up the work in statements and contextualizations that betray a very limited artistic ambition. They adopt the language of the conventional, calling themselves storytellers when their work contains no evidence of stories, or indulging in a kind of easy mystification by promoting themselves as belonging to a genre or a focus on their identity as the crux of the biscuit. It's a mindset of "fitting in" as some kind of an advantage, when history proves that the great masters did not fit in in their time. They were discovering the things we now champion as cannon, and students are taught to imitate.

In various time periods the questions students bring to me seem to group around common issues. I don't know why. A few years ago they tended to be about what makes pictures stronger and how to get them there. More recently the questions have tended to be centered around what to do with the pictures. They ask about making zines or books, and how to form exhibitions and groupings that will elevate their pictures, to legitimize their having been made. I have great sympathy for these practitioners. They are coming face to face with a highly spiritual question, one that requires a lot of humility to solve, and isn't much answered by "deciding." As human beings face the real stuff of life and death in artmaking our egos put up resistance. We resist the unknown. We resist enlightenment. We seek escape from the pain of not knowing. We want to know we're doing it right as defined by some easily named conventions, in the arenas of industry or commodities. I still really believe in the making of art as being all about the pursuit of magic, of having something in the outcomes that levitates off the page, screen, or wall. What you think it's all for can be so much more than notions of product or presentation. What are you asking from the work?

Despite my complete disinterest in religion, I feel great admiration for the artists and composers of centuries past who believed the purpose of their writing of fugues or making of paintings was to glorify the Lord. In service of the mysteries of the infinite, they did not settle for less than finished works that seemed to make evidence of unseen realms, or to stand in awe of forces that are beyond man's conception. How do we get back to that in our modern, cynical world that revolves around capital and competition? Maybe it starts with our discourse, and recognizing that we might be parroting the concerns of a naive point in the medium's past evolution, when we might do well to aim higher?

Links/news:

I lead workshops and do one-on-one consultations on Zoom.

My debut photo book, Heavenly Arms.

I’ll be selling and signing the book at Printed Matter’s New York Art Book Fair on Sept 13th.