Preparing for "The Photograph Within"

I’ve started gathering resources and organizing my thinking towards a workshop I am co-presenting (with my wife, Robin Shapiro) at the end of the month, "The Photograph Within" at the Newspace Center of Photography in Portland. You can get details of the workshop here.

I have internalized an approach to the process of photography that is largely inner-derived. It is the notion of photography as a mirror, as a mechanism for understanding your own relationship with the world, and for using photography as a feedback loop to be more attentive. I spent the afternoon today looking through my library and following the breadcrumbs of those influences. Minor White figures prominently, as does Frederick Sommer. I have a collection of essays, "The Camera Viewed: Writings on Twentieth Century Photography," edited by Peninah Petruck (Dutton, 1979) where I found a piece by Sommer that is marginally more accessible than his usual impenetrable prose. It is from a talk given at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1970.

"Let me assure you that nobody ever goes into far country. If you find yourself going to the zoo too often, it’s because you belong in a zoo in the first place; you’re at home there. We never go to strange places.Maybe the fare is expensive, and so, after some kind of expensive travel, we think we’re in exotic country. But, if we are somewhat comfortable there, it’s because we took a chunk of ourselves and found something of ourselves again. There is nothing to ‘East shall never meet West.’ The world is not a world of cleavages at all; the world is a world of bonds. Circulation of the blood is always circumnavigation of the world. We do not have it in our guts to misplace ourselves in such a way that we are uncomfortable where we go. This, from a photographer’s standpoint, is a tremendously important clue. I know now (and I should have known earlier) that we are completely incapable of ever seeing anything. Consequently, we would never photograph anything unless we have become attentive to it because we carry a great chunk of it within ourselves."

This recapitulates the philosophy of John Dewey, an important educational theorist who posited that we can’t learn what we don’t already know. Learning has to be experiential. His book, "Art as Experience" is an important read.

Here is where growth comes into the picture, again from Sommer:

"What I’m saying is that I’ve come to value photography not as a moment of truth, but as truth before the fact. There isn’t anything that you can do about taking a good photograph; you can’t get into the act and say, ‘I don’t want this shape to be this way.’ You have to accept an involved set of circumstances. And this involved set of circumstances is extraordinary and great for the simple reason that you don’t understand it. If you understood it truly, you wouldn’t care to do it; you would know that you were through with it.…We have to accept the consequences of what the camera presents; we have to learn to deal with it properly."

Comments

[matt]

Regarding your mention of John Dewey - I just had the opportunity of visiting the Barnes foundation outside of philadelphia, where Dewey had been education director for a while. The Barnes hosts more Cezanne's than all of Paris as well as the world's largest collection of Renoirs. Rather than being arranged chronologically or by artist, Barnes hung it all based purely on visual themes. Seeing the work there is a very unique way to "experience" art and will change one's view of how art is typically displayed. Worth a visit if you ever make it to the neighborhood, info at www.barnesfoundation.org