Seeing Myself In The Street

An Introduction

Dear Reader:

This first entry in my Substack newsletter is partly cannibalized from the introduction to my MFA thesis, Unparaphrasable Photographs. In the interests of just getting this newsletter off the ground and at the same time giving you a taste of what the future holds, I offer this slight reworking of old material. A little contextualization is a good thing, no? Introductions only scratch the surface. If you like what you see here, please let others know. My goal is to get at least one article per week up, and if I get in a groove I’ll be offering certain extra articles as premium-only content. For now everything I write will be free and available to all. Enjoy! –RR

SEEING MYSELF IN THE STREET

”I think that part of what you love when you're a street photographer is this kind of sensibility that develops, where you think you understand something about not only the person you're photographing, or the group you're photographing, but the culture at large. [You’re] responding to things, and at the same time you’re learning what they mean–– to you . What does a gesture signify? What does a certain kind of person make you feel like? You learn to deepen your way of reading these signs. It’s the joy of exchange: 'only I can identify with them in this way.” – Joel Meyerowitz (Dunn)

"Something that you feel will find its own form." – Jack Kerouac

I can still remember stepping out the door of my first New York City apartment on that brisk Fall morning in 1988. I felt like I was in a movie. The dual aromas of the briny harbor and October's falling leaves mingled with the smell of my leather motorcycle jacket as I clomped down Brooklyn's Fifth Avenue in Sunset Park, past the Mexican butcher shops with bloody carcasses hanging in the windows, run-down dollar stores with signs written in languages I couldn't read, and leather-skinned street vendors hawking hot peanuts or grilled meats on sticks. The streets were full of busy strangers, all moving in a swirl of activity, wild, hectic, and yet perfectly organized in layers of mechanized repetition. Intimate conflicts and oblivious acts of striving were flying in every direction. The subway rumbled underneath my feet, like a volcano threatening to blow its top. Above my head tall buildings formed a landscape as grand to me as any mountain range from my native Virginia. Each square foot of sidewalk my engineer boots scraped were embedded with ancient grey pock marks of chewing gum, crushed cigarette butts, mysteriously sticky, candy-colored stains, and chunks of broken glass. The street’s sound was made of many sounds: honking horns, maniacal laughter, mothers smacking their rowdy kids, whooping car alarms, lovers’ quarrels, busses screeching to a stop or start, skinny stumbling men with torn clothing muttering "spare change" with hands extended, boom cars blasting Puerto Rican salsa cruising by at regular intervals, thumping violently, temporarily blotting out all other sound, thought, and vision, shaking my very molecules like a seizure. I felt in that moment that somehow I had never been truly alive, or maybe I had just never woken up before in a place that was truly alive. I was completely in love. I still am.

At this point in time I was a couple months shy of twenty-two years old and I had never owned a camera, had no particular interest in carrying one, and photography was not something I thought about. I was a musician as far as I knew. But for no reason that I can trace, and without any precedent in my life, I began taking “pictures” on the street with my mind. Numerous times a day I would pass duos or trios of people striding in the opposite direction, gesturing wildly at each other as they talked. In every encounter, on every corner, stoop, or subway platform, no matter how fleeting, there seemed to be a single, incredibly fine moment of crystallization, an apex of people's performance of life that seemed to freeze in my vision, uniquely recognized and selected by me. I may never know what caused me to habitually see street action fixed in this way. Was it the photographs I’d absorbed in books and magazines without ever thinking about “photography?” Was it my mind's involuntary urges toward preservation? Was it the stylistic use of freeze-frames in the opening credit montages of TV shows I grew up watching, like The Rockford Files, or The Odd Couple ? Was it from the rock 'n' roll photographs I'd compulsively studied in my obsession with music? Stills from 50's noir films I stared at in books? I often wonder about this. It would be a great many years before I would finally come to recognize that this instinctive compulsion of mine, of slicing mental frames of frozen gesture out of the stream of New York City street life, was in its essence a desire to photograph.

The story most photographic lives used to begin with was a romantic, sensual discovery of the medium itself. Either the young photographer got hooked by the magic of seeing a print come up in a developing tray in someone’s stinky basement darkroom, or maybe they saw a particular photograph that haunted them, awakened their imagination, spoke to them in some special voice until they themselves were compelled to take up the practice of picture taking, because something in them they couldn't name had been externalized for them. In my case the subject itself, unposed human life, came first. From that first morning in Brooklyn I was astonished over and over again at the miraculously odd sights the people of New York provided. I spent the next twenty years fumbling to recount what I’d been witness to, saying to my friends “oh, you should have seen it!” feeling continually disappointed in my own verbal descriptions of the surprises I encountered. Words always fell short. My experiences were unparaphrasable. They had to be seen the way I saw them, and then, only then, maybe you would understand my amazement and amorousness about the city. It may have at first been a desire to document–at least partially–but whether I recognized it or not, I also wanted to be able to depict my own relationship with the street, my feeling, or understanding of what it was I loved. The tension of this desire overcame me around the time I turned forty years old, and after several weeks of trying to resist the urge, I bought my first camera. That was almost sixteen years ago. I could not have imagined the discoveries this would lead to.

Street photography has been around approximately since the 1930's, when the camera became portable and film became fast enough to stop the motion of people and objects. People's sense of wonder at seeing their world rendered in the photograph without overt arrangement or overly formal poses quickly overshadowed the superstition and distrust the medium had also previously inspired. Painters feared they would no longer be considered important, and religious reactionaries spoke against the photograph's apparent sorcery, but human beings' sense of enchantment at its visual and psychological descriptive prowess and immediacy endured and increased as the 20th Century unfolded. At the dawn of the 2000s, the advent of digital technology, the Internet, and eventually smartphones, broke open the floodgates to put photography in the hands of virtually everyone on the planet. Photography is a language all of us now speak, contributing to a vast visual culture.

My photography is how I enter the world. It has provided me with a venue to heal my long-felt sense of separation from others, the feeling of being apart, rather than a part. The truth is, I have struggled much of my life with anger, self-hate, and negativity; it's no coincidence that my artistic practice would be so rooted in and dependant on my being continually involved with people, out in the public square. Many assume that street work is made either voyeuristically or from a confrontational position, but there are myriad approaches, and I experience the dynamic of my shooting day as a fluid set of moves, and my relationship to what is going on in the world shifts and changes as I am simultaneously observing it, melding with it, and responding to it. After I've been out photographing long enough to find a groove, something transforms in me. The judgmental and hostile attitudes that my mind habitually defaults to drop away completely, and the entire unfolding circus of the city just amazes and amuses me. My perception and opinions are unchanged, but my separateness is gone, my empathy is awakened, and I begin to feel that I am taking care of something precious with my camera and my activity.

I am an artist who thrives, and depends on, daily practice, and I believe very much in the definition of practice that I learned from author and writing teacher Natalie Goldberg, who said that a practice is “something you do for its own sake under all circumstances.” It doesn't matter if that practice is writing, or playing the piano, or sitting Zen meditation. You have a cold? You practice. You just found out your best friend is getting divorced? You do your practice. You feel like you'd really like to just eat red seedless grapes and watch The Three Stooges on TV? You return to your practice. Not because we're trying to be good people or because we're trying to make great art, but because it gives our life an important grounding, a way to wake up to the present moment and be alive. In my case, discovering the inherent value in practice not only taught me how to get words––true words––onto the page, or photographs on the wall, it also saved my life, and continues to. It grounds me in the place where I live, my community, and gives me a way to explore who I am, providing me the means to appreciate the miracle of my time and my culture. The practice, for me, is the work.

My practice is a feedback loop: I photograph the world, guided by honed instincts and subjective perceptions, I look at the pictures and analyze or evaluate what was or wasn't fruitful for me, and make little discoveries about my own nature, desires and obsessions, or relationships of elements in the frames which did not occur to me in the moment of shooting. Often the conclusions are more felt than understood, but those discoveries help me to determine my next steps, and I return to photographing, only to repeat the process again and again.

Something I've learned through this practice, and been forced to accept, is that I am easily paralyzed by an over-abundance of options. One of the reasons I've shaped my practice around sticking with simple tools, like one camera and one lens, is to keep myself from obsessing about the choices which have at times kept me from forward motion. I used to spend copious amounts of time wrestling with whether to use this or that equipment, or whether to make a particular image in black and white or in color. I knew I could not continue this obsessive whirlpool if I wanted to enjoy real progress. During graduate study I took actions to simplify even further. I did use two cameras, but only one focal length of lens, and other than a brief experiment during my third semester where I returned to shooting film, I remained in the digital photo process. Dilemmas for me are more debilitating than any choice I might make in the face of them. I kept my tools simple, and as a result my productivity was strong.

The only lingering misgiving I had about working in the digital format, which haunted me, was the loss of tangibility. I never felt comfortable with my pictures living only on screens and hard drives. There were no physical negatives to touch or see accumulating. I felt as if the photos weren't "real" in some subtle way. So I set out to make printing a regular part of my practice for the first time, making work prints on a weekly basis, and working towards final prints of the works that felt important to me. The experience of learning to use the large format printer, and finding out what the different choices of paper and processes could reveal in my photographs, gave me a lot more than that missing tangibility. It refined my sense of what I was crafting. It's given me a deeper understanding of the work is and what it can be. The effect on my work was, to me, dramatic.

When I entered graduate study I was intent on expanding the possibilities of my already well-formed practice as a street photographer by pushing myself in several key aspects. I was hungry for discoveries. Many of the greatest breakthroughs in my work up to that point had come at times when I either felt at a creative plateau, sensing that I was repeating myself, and pushed myself to find new questions, or when a "mistake" led me to see possibilities I could not have imagined or intended. I wanted a program of new mistakes and fresh risks. At first, that would take the form of self-assignments, directing my attention to events like protests and demonstrations, performances, community gatherings, private parties, all seen as potential source material for my work just as the wandering street shooting I still did on a daily basis.

Paydirt for me in photography and life has rarely seemed to come from deciding in advance what would be most useful, but rather in freely responding, so a crucial step towards moving beyond seeing the street as my sole material was to begin considering all areas of my own life and experience the potential source of my photographs, rather than just the situations that struck me as "photographic."

After only a short time of bringing this awareness and desire into my personal life, and writing about it, I experienced an epiphany, a kind of spiritual insight into my own history and character. I came to realize that as a very young person, perhaps in my tweens or teens, I had formed a dogmatic idea of the “artist” as someone involved in artmaking 24/7, that there was no ordinary “normal life” in their day-to-day existence. My definition of “normal life” was of course incredibly vague, and as yet unarticulated, but in my head it was pretty much anything that was not some form of artmaking, performance, or activities directly related to those acts. Work, shopping for groceries, arranging furniture, watching sports, family gatherings...all were seen by me as annoying interruptions to the obsession I lived in. As a young musician I was continually frustrated with having to wait. It felt like I was always waiting to have the right space, equipment, or people in place, waiting to have a gig, spare time, or enough money to record our music...or whatever else got in the way of getting to the hour, or two, or more, when I would finally get to be alive (on stage). Likewise, when photography was a thing I did primarily in specific outings this sense of separation continued, but as I expanded my practice to where there was no “shooting time” vs “non-shooting” time, I immediately felt I was living out my deepest dreams, maybe for the first time ever. Even if I didn’t actually take any pictures in a given situation, having the camera around my neck and knowing that at any moment there might be something to photograph transformed my experience of living. For me, it was the answer to a question I didn’t know I’d been asking my whole life. Photography lends itself particularly well to this approach to art practice. The camera can go everywhere, and is always prepared. Wherever you go, there you are.

The viewer of my photographs will very often wonder: what is really happening here? What happened afterwards? What is your relationship to the people in the picture? etc... I don't want to answer these questions, not only because they don't make the pictures better (in fact the answers take a lot of the fun out of them for me) but because I discovered that that experience, that state of mind in the viewer, was a magic component and was the actual subject matter I've been chasing for the last twelve years. The early influences on my street photography, like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Garry Winogrand, and Helen Levitt, capitalized on this same effect much of the time. It’s a psychological experience that may be particular to photography, perhaps because we inevitably view the photograph as an authentication of reality. We all know what a photograph is and when we are looking at one. We think: this event I see in the photograph must be something that really happened, and so if the event seems unlikely or impossible, or difficult to explain, the mind tries to make sense of it and says, in a way, “how amazing that this is real!” If I painted you a picture of the same scene, it might have the same compositional strength, or its intellectual content might speak to the same human concerns, but the authentication of it being in the form of a photograph carries its own special weight. It’s the flipside of the experience we have of, say, a photorealistic painting, which induces the psychological experience, “how can this look so real when I know it isn’t?”

Curious as I was about the question of "reality" in photography, I was fortunate early in my first semester at Goddard to be introduced to the work of art philosopher Susanne Langer, in particular her book Feeling And Form . Langer rigorously breaks art mediums down to what she identifies as their primary illusion. Still photography, however, is never mentioned anywhere in the book. Following her thinking though, and applying it to photography, I began to see that the most obvious photographic metaphor of "stopped time" wouldn't tell the whole story. The psychological awareness of the photograph as an authentication of reality is what makes the illusion powerful and gives it its ability to carry the particular weight that it does. Even in photographic work which does not come from the continuum of life, say conceptual photography or the fashion image, there is an automatic acceptance in the viewer of this authentication which creates its own aspect of wonder. The dichotomy in the camera is that it can easily be forced to be a servant of modernist aspirations to objectivity, or it can become the enabler of all manner of postmodern simulation or distortions.

The camera is a wonderfully simple device. It is merely a box with a hole in it. We add to that a mechanism to make the hole larger and smaller, and some means to open and close the hole for different lengths of time, and then some material, analog or digital, to record the light that's let into the box. That's all. It's astonishing that such a simple mechanical device can function as something so much more than its nature would imply. Winogrand understood this when he said, “A photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how a camera saw a piece of time and space." (Freyer) This, in a way, gets to the core of what Langer's thinking led me to. The illusion of literal description. Description is not the reality, and the photograph isn't even the description. It's one step away––an illusion of description. And not even of what a photographer saw, but what a camera saw. If I hold the camera down at belt level and take a picture it depicts things quite differently from how I see them with my eyes at that moment in time. This is an important distinction. And yet, my artistic vision or output, as viewable to others, is paradoxically a mixture of my intentions, desires, tastes, and responses, rendered with a mechanical tool that introduces its own influential characteristics and hallmarks of process, rendered as something that can be interpreted and argued in myriad ways.

It wasn't lost on me that in between breakthroughs my greatest teacher or source of understanding of the medium of photography was my own extensive experience in other art forms, primarily music. I was turned off by the contemporary discourses in photography. Their concerns tended to be centered around matters of surface. The limited dogmas of the mid-Twentieth Century had given way to an overabundance of genres, schools, and careerist attitudes which seemed to be full of counterproductive assumptions at best, and at worst negativity and laziness. I saw in photography a great many of the least useful discourses I'd witnessed in my thirty-five years as a performing musician being replicated in their essence. Arguments about whether someone's photo project was or wasn't truly "street photography" was strangely reminiscent of the arguments I'd lived through about whether a music qualified as "jazz" or not. Dilemmas about traditional film vs. digital capture were exactly the same as the holy war between champions of digital audio recording and analog tape enthusiasts. Answers to these questions were self-evident, and purism was wearing a thousand faces. I had struggled with these issues as a musician and come out the other side feeling free. Entering the world of photography I saw I was not finished facing these outdated questions, or the potential distractions of entrenchments in tribal divisions. We needed new thinking in photography, and I wanted to get started.

When I saw these parallels between principles or issues in photography and the ones I'd already grappled with in my past experience in thirty-five years of playing music. I wondered: how far can I take this line of connection? Can photographs be seen the same way as music? Can the properties by which I understand music or other art forms be applied universally? For instance, Western harmony functions in patterns of tension and release. And don't photographs have tension at the edges of the frame and a lack of tension in the center? Can this be exploited? Don't rhythmic patterns in music find their metaphor in repetition in photographs? To be sure, there are properties and possibilities particular to every art medium, but I was convinced then and now that a deeper understanding of the work can come from making connections between fundamentals in multiple disciplines. As I followed this line of inquiry throughout my research I found metaphorical and concrete connections which have now permeated my practice, my teaching, and my understanding of my work's potential future growth.

My exploration of the ethical questions surrounding my work and the lack of reasonably objective conclusions to adopt led me to deeply question what my own personal values were, which were clearly what had been informing my ethical practices all along. After much writing and soul searching, I can say the values I hold most dear (which relate to the ethics of my practice) are: authenticity, risk, and opposition to dogmas, hierarchy and conformity. I believe that artworks ought to be inherently challenging, “an axe for the frozen sea within us,” as Kafka said. I also find great beauty in things some might find unpleasant or ugly. They give me a visceral reaction which I value more than a passive state of admiration I have for the unchallengingly beautiful where I feel like nothing is at risk for the artist or audience. Photographs can convey a lot of information, but that is a lot less exciting to me than the inducing of feelings, whatever their qualities, and discomfort isn't just one feeling, but many. It may be more useful than ease and safety, or knowing you’re good.

In our current age, awareness of the camera and dissemination of its output has increased many people's nervousness about being photographed, despite the near-constant surveillance state we now live in which they hardly notice, and do little to resist. I also happen to think we live in a time where media saturation, reality TV, and social media, have caused people to imagine themselves as celebrities, inundated by paparazzi. As a result I am very fortunate that my desire for the candid picture forced me to develop skills like blending into the scenes I shoot, harmonizing with others' energy, and doing my best to project a benevolent or unimportant presence. Still, questions do arise at times about the ethical considerations of photographing people, particularly without their permission (as if permission would remove the risks of someone being portrayed in a way they may not like). After much reflection I found myself coming full-circle to where I started, that a photograph is merely an illusion of a literal description, and it would seem silly to question the ethics of say, a painter saying what she wants to say by using the world as her material, but again, the psychological power of the photograph leads many to question the fairness of the image of the Other being used by the collaborating photographer. I see this aspect of my practice, and its existence in the 100-year continuum of street photography as fully justified by both my good intent, the lack of demonstrable harm to others, and by the benefit to those who view my work in validating their experience of their own life. My beliefs are admittedly subjective. Finding an objective right and wrong when it comes to photography is impossible as far as I can tell. I firmly believe however that the wonders of life and experience are meant for all of us to observe, enjoy, and use.

Works Cited:

ASX Team. “Garry Winogrand Is Interviewed by Bill Moyers (1982).” AMERICAN SUBURB X, 9 Oct. 2015, www.americansuburbx.com/2009/06/interview-garry-winogrand-excerpts-with.html .

Dsouza, John. “DAVID KOLB'S CYCLE OF LEARNING:” Medium, Medium, 14 Mar. 2016, medium.com/@johnharrydsouza/david-kolb-s-cycle-of-learning-2777d150d09e.

Dunn, Cheryl, director. Everybody Street. Alldayeveryday, 2013.
Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable. Freyer, Sasha Waters, director. Submarine Pictures, 2018.
Kerouac, Jack. You're a Genius All the Time: Belief and Technique for Modern Prose . Chronicle Books, 2009.