About a year ago I saw an artist talk by a photographer who was taking pictures of sites where violent crimes had occurred. The images were showing at Newspace Center for Photography and it seemed to resonate as powerful work with viewers. For a reason that I couldn’t define at the time, it bothered me and I only now am able to describe why.
It seems like a lot of work that I see these days is generated from a very strong idea, or concept. Often though, I find that without that idea supporting the work, the images don’t seem to stand on their own. With the work I saw at Newspace, if I didn’t know the story behind the images, I would find the work pretty average and dull. And so it left me wondering why there seems to be this transformation happening, and again, I wonder if it is some need to be taken more seriously as artists. My worry with it is twofold, one that the images themselves aren’t holding up to the power of the idea, and two, that the best thing about photography, it’s accessibility to general viewership, will be lost.
It got me thinking about what is it that makes us respond to an image? Is it beauty discovered? Is it the idea behind the photograph? Is finding truth or some new reality? Is it the print itself? Or, some combination of these and/or other qualities?
It got me thinking about this photograph:
© Doron Henkin. Belarus.
My cousin just sent me this image and I imagined immediately photographing those trees. If I presented you with some beautiful images of them, would that be enough? What if I added that they have been protecting the graves of my relatives that had been murdered during the Holocaust? Would knowing that impact the importance or value of the images I presented? And more importantly, should it have an impact?
I bring this up because I worry about the need to impose these overarching themes or ideas on our photographs. Does it make them better pieces of art? Rather, should we simply allow images to do what they do best, encourage interpretation?
I just saw the current exhibition at Blue Sky Gallery here in Portland. One of the portfolios presented was by Livia Corona titled Enanitos Toreros which presents the life and work of little people who perform in Mexico and parts of the US as the famed Dwarf Bullfighters of Mexico. The photographs were presented in a very unconventional way. On one of the walls was a 10′ x 16′ (my guess) image that had been sliced into pieces to make one giant image that size. All the other walls were populated with much smaller, maybe 4″x6″ prints held by pins that were centered maybe 7′ up from the ground. The “concept” behind this presentation was so that you would know what it was like to have to look up at people all the time. The problem was that I couldn’t see any of the photographs. At 5′-4″, I couldn’t get a good look at any of the small prints, and the large one was so difficult to look at that I gave up after very short while. Why was this necessary? Why was it necessary to create a whole “concept” for even the presentation of these images? I don’t get it, and more than that. I resented that my experience in viewing what I had hoped would be interesting photographs was completely ruined by the need to make a point. Why not just let me come to that conclusion with the images?
One of my favorite books of the year is Robert Adams’ Summer Nights, Walking. Do you really think that book would be published today if it was by some emerging artist? To those of you, like myself, who have gone through the portfolio reviews, who are required to present “tight” bodies of work, do you think a body of work simply about walking around at night would work? Or would it have to be something like Summer Nights, Walking In Orlando With Cross-Dressing Lion Cubs Against Drunk Driving?
I suppose my point in all of this, is that I love getting lost in work where the photographer has left me enough room to take something of my own away from the images. I don’t want the viewing of photography to be similar to how my mom views most of the work we see every time we visit MoMA. It usually ends in frustration with something like, I just don’t get it.
Yes, let’s work toward including Photography in the Arts section of Amazon (right now it’s listed as “Arts & Photography”). But let’s not lose sight of what enables photography to still be the most powerful of artistic mediums, the ability for many people to get it.
