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When Beauty Is in the Eye of the Camera

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What do you see?  A beautiful golden artifact, or a gaudy piece of jewelry?  A work of art that could have come from any one of dozens of cultures, or a merely decorative visual contrivance reflecting hoarded wealth?

How about a spiral staircase in the Vatican museum, as seen through a fisheye lens?  Perhaps there are a few people who could recognize both the technical distortion and the specific staircase, but it is safe to say that most of us were not seeing a spiral staircase in the Vatican museum.  That tableau was merely the visual material for a process of technical distortion.   And artistic distortion.  There is no actual “eye of the camera,” but rather a creative process that includes a photographer, a camera, a lens, and several computers.   And now you.

I had not seen the staircase previously; or if I did see it on my Vatican tour, it left no trace in my memory.  I still haven’t seen it, you might say.  So what are we seeing?  A “striking visual effect,” and symmetry, and the Golden Ratio, and a microcosm, and rich colors of earth and sky, and light and darkness in perfect complementarity, and . . . .  ?  Some may call it beauty, and others may still see kitsch, but the aesthetic judgment is almost beside the point.  What is most striking, I believe, is the photograph’s assertion of photography’s creative capacity.

Consider, for example, how this image does not conform to conventional ideas about photography: It is not a direct representation of reality; it is not showing what those present will have seen; it is not the record of a specific event.  At the same time, the image also eludes stock criticisms of the medium: it is not hiding its distortion; it does not displace or dominate other views of the staircase; it does not demean the literal context or crowd out real beauty.

To fully appreciate what has been put before us by the photographer, we have to bracket conventional wisdom across the board.  What to do next is not as clear, but several options are available.  One is to consider how photography is not making copies of the world, but instead making images and statements about the world.  Another is to consider how photography is closest to realizing its potential when revealing patterns in the world, patterns expressed through its formal artistry.

There also might be something to the fact that this image is both cosmic and cosmetic: a self-enclosed world and a bauble.  The Greek word “kosmos” meant both universe and ornament, thereby capturing the irrelevance of scale to form.  Thus, when admiring the formal beauty of this small jewel of an image you are becoming attuned to a basic pattern found in sea shells and galaxies.  Curiously, you also are are getting inside the actual staircase.

I can imagine how the Vatican might have several reasons for liking the photograph.  I like it, too, and hope that you can enjoy it as well.  But have you noticed that something is a bit off at the top?  A slight imbalance, perhaps.  Something that could put a wobble into a top, or a planet.  But perhaps that is part of the pattern. . . . .   If, as Elaine Scarry has suggested, beauty prompts questions, then the questions here might go in several directions.  One is deeper into the technical mechanisms and decisions defining  photography.  Another is into our experience of beauty.  A third path, given the location of the staircase, would be into theology.   When beauty is in the eye of the camera, there is no telling where it will stop.

Photograph by Franco Origlia/Getty.  For more on this theme, see, e.g., recent work by Kaja Silverman, Joel Synder, Geoffrey Batchen, and the last chapter of The Public Image.  For earlier posts, you might look here and at others on beauty.  For an allusion that leads to a more complicated view of the church, see The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong.

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Visions of the 1 % at Fashion Week

Tired of war, refugees, and Donald Trump?  Take heart: Fashion Week is here.  But although we might want diversion, escape, or vicarious indulgence of wretched excess, even the fashion shows are saying something about the news.  One of the themes this year is that wealth is here to stay.

OK, that may be one of the themes every year, but what’s interesting is that the designers are tuned in to how the 1% will continue to rule.  So far this year, there are at least two serious options.  One uses the theme of a new feudalism.

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This couture gown from Valentino took 1,300 hours to make.  1300 hours, and it still gets a lot of mileage from bare skin.  Maria Grazia Chiuri suggested that the show represented “diversity, and freedom, and the chance to express yourself.”  True enough, and certainly so if compared to ISIS.  But actually the look is going in the same direction as the Islamic State: back into a premodern world.

I see a woman waking in an ancient courtyard.  She might be a queen or a courtesan, and there aren’t too many other options.  Her bare feet, flowing gown, and jeweled hair evoke movie images of Greece or Rome, and the bare feet and shoulders suggest a warm environment–whether in a past Mediterranean world or one remade by global warming.  Like the model she is, she is likely to be doing what she is  told: making an entrance to play her role, or an exit to meet her fate.

The dress is too expensive for most of us but the image suggests a common destiny: a world that is devolving–changing, despite all its technological prowess–back into a time of extremes and inequities, hoarding and scarcity, nobles and peasants.  Many TV shows, movies, video games, novels, and other arts are exploring this vision.  They are obvious acts of imagination, but they are representations of real tendencies in modern societies around the globe.

And they can be wrong.  Not, however, because something like a reasonable social contract and shared prosperity will be restored.  The fashion shows present another alternative, one that is just a bit retro, uncannily so.

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In this tableau, the future is already here and it looks a lot like a modern past.  Posh, preppy, call it what you will: the 1 % rule look as they have before, although perhaps even more explicitly entitled and insolent.  The image also suggests that race and sexuality can be easily appropriated (as they always were) to reinforce class domination.  But I digress.  This is not the time to denigrate what progress has occured; not when the image is reminding us that nonetheless we might be slipping back into a social order made for the few and the very few.

As Scott Fitzgerald knew when he wrote The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Photographs by Miquel Medina/AFP-Getty Images and Kevin Tachman for Michael Kors.

Cross-posted at Reading the Pictures.

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Star Wars Optics and Socialist Dreams

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Incredible, isn’t it?  So perfectly designed and yet so strange.  Ultramodern and yet medieval, like a space ship on a surveillance mission and a castle readied for battle, set off by itself in forbidding isolation and yet connected somehow to distant galaxies.  The tableau is so unique and so striking that it could be a scene from the forthcoming Star Wars blockbluster: we can imagine the rebel stragglers, downed on an unknown planet, approaching the daunting edifice that has emerged out of the snowstorm.  They can’t survive outside, but they don’t know what lies within.  Friend or enemy?  Life, death, or something worse than death?

They were socialists, actually: the structure is a monument to socialism built on Bulgaria’s Mount Buzludzha.  It is one of a series of remarkable images captured by photographer Danila Tkachenko.  The exhibition is available in the current issue of the National Geographic Magazine and at their website. Influenced by a nuclear waste explosion that had scarred his own family, Tkachenko set out “to look for other sites and structures that symbolized an abandoned march toward progress.”  He found them.

The movie optic doesn’t come from Tkachenko, and I don’t intend to make light of his work.  But science fiction movies and documentary photography have more and more important intersections than you might think.  (Search for “science fiction” at this blog and you’ll see a few more examples of what I have in mind.)  Tkachenko describes the now abandoned monument as a “very surrealistic object,” and he’s right.  Although having the exceptional formal simplicity and coherence of a fine art object, it nonetheless is out of place with itself and its surroundings: the scene presents a mixture of aesthetics, politics, and an abstracted natural environment where each part seems alien to the others even as they fit together seamlessly.  Surreal indeed.

Susan Sontag declared that “photography is the only art that is natively surreal.”  That was not meant to be a compliment.  It was instead a radical deconstruction of the medium that was thought to be inherently realistic.  Sontag was right, but not in the manner that she would have wished.  Photography is surreal, and good thing, too, for that is exactly why it is capable of capturing the “natively surreal” features of social reality.  Which, I might add, is a lot of social reality.

The monument itself may not be to your taste. I think it is magnificent, but you might see a glorified birdbath.  That disagreement is worth having, but it is beside the point today.  The photograph has captured something more comprehensive than the artwork itself: the pervasive alienation of the socialist ideal on planet Earth.  True, Bulgaria fell well short of the ideal society, and the money spent on the monument perhaps could have gone to help the common people rather than glorify an ideal or a regime ruling in its name.  But if present trends continue, one can imagine a planet trapped in a perpetual winter of neoliberal capitalism.  That planet could be dotted with massive, ultramodern castles surrounded by vast spaces of abandonment. It would seem like a movie to us today, but we already are living the trailer.

Perhaps an abandoned monument to a noble dream is surreal, but some day rebel stragglers may look up at the ruin and want to ask, compared to what?

Photograph by Danila Tkachenko.  The quote from Sontag is from On Photography, p. 51.

Cross-posted at ReadingThePictures.

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Nature Photography’s Liminal Moments

Iguana

Fabulous, isn’t it?  As if from a fable, perhaps: “Once every 1000 years the Magical Iguana King would surface to inhale a silver bubble of air.  And if at that moment he saw a sea eagle, he would become Lord of the Sea and the Sky.  But if the bird was not in sight, then he would return to his sunken lair for another 1000 years.”

This iguana might be magical–after all, he is digital–and he already is a mediator between sea and sky.  The photograph provides a stunning tableau of how separate worlds meet at the surface of things: three worlds, actually, as we also see the rocks of a sea cave framing the heavenly vista that extends far above and along the water.  The iguana represents a fourth world, that of organic life, but it also seems to incorporate the first three in its rock-like skin, streamlined posture, and eye that can see along the rays of light permeating the air.

So it is that the photo captures a profound sense of liminality: the border between things.  We see water and earth and sky and animal, but each of these separate entities is also part of the borders between them, which are something else as well.  The slightly turbulent, partially illuminated surface of the water and the outline of the sky made by the rock create a sense of bounded yet dynamic space, which contrasts with the vast darkness below and the endlessness above.  That border is neither one side nor the other, but both, just as the animal is neither above nor below the water, but both.

Although the act of breaking the surface will have lasted only a moment, the photograph has a sense of timelessness.  The iguana looks like a prehistoric creature, the dark sea and distant sun have been there for billions of years, and there is no sign of anything having changed since then.  Some say that photography shouldn’t aspire to the timelessness of art, but that’s the wrong standard anyway (and not only for photography).  The beauty of this photograph has done something important, which is to show how the enormous scale of nature’s time and space also includes the magic of surfaces–of those places, often very small places, where forces meet and mingle.

And not just once.

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This is another example of what I have in mind.  You are looking at a wave that looks like a rock.  The incredible motility of the water has acquired the solidity of rock, which we can see because of the contrast with the sky.  The illusion (if you want to call it that) also is caused by the light flowing through the water, but that proves the point: what we think of as one thing is two or more; a wave is both air and sky, not to mention the motion of earth and moon.  This wave is a border between sea and sky, and one might well wonder what great leviathan could be rising to break the surface.

This photo, like the one above, also seems to depict nature’s timelessness in a liminal moment.  And why not?  Not only are the techniques the same, but the subject is the same.  That wave lasted only a few seconds, but the water and wind shaping it have been there for billions of years and will be there long after we are gone.  We can sense  the abstract forces coursing through the wave, and we can see texture of its surface, which is at once sea and sky.  Together they communicate nature’s glory.

The wave, like view from the sea cave above, also is the product of digital processing.  I wouldn’t worry about that.  Like the effect of the light through the water in each scene, the tonalities of the image are neither fixed nor misleading.  It is only by seeing these scenes somewhat imaginatively that one can begin to appreciate how the world is made, and that is true whether you see it through the lens of art or science.  To the extent the processing helped bring out the richness of the world, so be it.

These photographs are not only an education in natural beauty; they also exemplify how photography itself is a liminal art.  The photograph is a thin surface between two worlds: neither here nor there, and neither past nor present, but both.  Every photograph puts us into a liminal space–a space where perhaps we can breathe a silver bubble of air and see anew.

Photographs by Lorenzo Mittig and Ray Collins at Smithsonian.com.  The first was the winner and the second a finalist in the Natural World category at the Smithsonian Magazine 2014 photo contest.

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How Photography Supplements Secularization

Monks at sunrise

I guess we’re doing silhouettes this week.  And monks.  And springtime religious festivals–in this case, Makha Bucha Day at the Wat Phra Dhammakaya temple in Thailand.  As inquiring minds can learn by using the search function at this blog, I’ve posted quite a bit on all of these figures and events.  So what’s new?

Nothing, actually, and that may  be the point.  Modernity is all about novelty, change, progress, so much so that the news is its characteristic discursive form.  We want to know what is new, whether good or bad, and how it can be leveraged to move forward into something newer and better.  But that relentless forward drive has its costs, not least a need for the sense of stability, order, and serenity that can come from the deep cycles of ritual recurrence.  While modern life is not without its rituals, they are for most of us weak things, easily broken or ignored.  So it is that we turn to beautiful images to supply what is missing.

Ritual is rarely far from religion, which also has been progressively diminished as part of the relentless disenchantment of the world that characterizes modern societies.  Religion is still a strong force in the world, but the alignments are clear: although easily mixed with technological modernization, religious piety and obedience are at odds with the secularization everywhere evident in the more advanced societies.  But that comprehensive elimination of spirits and sacred places has its costs, not least a need for re-enchantment.  Advertisers and other media industries are more than happy to help, but the result is a very long way from a life of compassion and communion.  So it is that we turn to images of a religious dedication otherwise missing in our everyday life.

This photograph of the silhouetted monks at sunrise is hardly news, but it is a beautiful tableau of ritual reassurance and the possibility of holiness.  The thick, warm light is a medium not of sudden enlightenment, but rather of the radiance of being itself.  Each monk is isolated as a specific individual with a specific destiny, yet never one that is any farther away from sacred envelopment.  Their implicit community is confirmed by the cooperative gestures of the dyad in the middle, who double as tokens of attentive care and discipline.  Monks work, it seems, and yet the scene looks nothing like the  workplaces we know so well.  The scene is all too otherworldly, which is why we look at it, vaguely wishing that it might somehow–not literally, but somehow–be the mirror image our own experience.

Makha Bucha Day celebrates an anniversary of the Buddha’s enlightenment when an assembly of monks formed spontaneously at the sacred site, and it occurs at the time of a full moon.  Each of these senses of the event are reflected in the photograph above: the enlightenment has already happened, the community emerges naturally, and in accordance with a cyclic occurrence of reflected light.  The photograph succeeds, then, in respect to its initial context, but it travels because it is about something else: those of us who are not monks, caught up too much of the time in a different Enlightenment, organized every way but spontaneously, and missing though not really working for a deeper sense of the sacred in our lives.

Photography fills that need, and not just with images of the relatively few monks in the world.  (Search for “abundance” to see more about that in previous posts.)  It provides images of the sacred that can be fitted easily into the routines of a secular society.  One could criticize the medium in respect to every part of that sentence, but I won’t.  Modernity is here, even if not to stay.  The supplement adds to and may eventually displace, but that is another story.  For now, during a season of reflection in many religions around the globe, it may be enough to have a glimpse of another way of being that is at once simple and sustaining.  Even if, like the moon, it is farther away than it appears.

Photograph by Damir Sagoli/Reuters.

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Random Acts of Public Art

Winter still hangs on in the Northern Hemisphere, with the occasional thaw only enough to bring up the accumulated dirt and trash.  In the Crimea, another democratic spring has been flipped within days into another authoritarian consolidation of power; the pattern is now all too clear, while the rapidity of the military response is becoming truly impressive.  In Malaysia, a 777 has disappeared into thin air; at least the UFO hunters will be thrilled, but everyone else who flies now lives in a slightly more uncomfortable world.  And if that weren’t enough disquiet, for some us the calendar has moved into Lent, a time for reflection on our many personal failings.  So perhaps you can appreciate why I am grateful for this photograph.

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The caption at The Big Picture said: “Reflected in a puddle of melted snow, people and dogs walk past umbrellas suspended from trees at Spanish Banks Beach in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Feb. 25.  The art installation, called the ‘Rainblossom Project’, was put up by an anonymous group to be a celebration of the rain the city receives.”

My favorite part of that caption is the word “anonymous.”  Whatever else happened on February 25th, there was someone in Vancouver who wasn’t working on branding, who wasn’t worried about others free-riding, who was willing to spend time and money and effort to improve the commons, and do it without any reward, much less making a profit.  Maybe it was a hedge fund manager on his day off, but I doubt it.  This was done by someone who cares about art and the general welfare in equal measure, and who is able to express those commitments generously.  We can call it a random act of public art.

The same can be said of the photograph.  “Random” may seem incorrect, for surely the photographer was acting on an intention, but the same is true of the red umbrella hangers and the other strangers signified by the allusion to “random acts of kindness.”  The act is, by definition, intentional, but “random” because not directed by the usual logics of economic exchange, competitive marketing, political persuasion, or even direct social reciprocity.  Yes, the photographer will have been paid for the image, but there was no guarantee of that happening, not least because there was little chance of finding hard news, or even soft news, on a beach in Vancouver in February.  This image barely qualifies as news at all, although it does inform us about the public artwork on the beach.  It’s something else: another work of public art, and one just about as incidental, unexpected, ephemeral, and generous as the other.

And what a fine work it is.  The photo is true to the work it depicts, while enhancing and extending it as well.  The red umbrellas hang improbably in the sky, and the trees, mountain, clouds, sky, and lake seem equally improbable and beautiful as well.  That lake, itself perhaps newly freed from the ice, reflects the figures above it, just as the photograph reflects the entire tableau.  Likewise, the deep blues balance the blossoms of bright red, as if they were low and high notes harmonizing.  These symmetrical optics evoke a sense of serenity, but not by pretending that the scene is any more solid than it is.  The reflection on the water can be broken by a single ripple, just as the scene can disappear the moment you turn away.

And we all will turn away.  Even those in the scene, who rightly seem to be enjoying it immensely, will walk on.  The clouds will thicken, and the rain will come–remember, the umbrellas are an offering of gratitude for the rain–and the umbrellas will deteriorate or be taken down.  Like the rain, this scene is not something that you can hold on to.  Only the photograph will remain, albeit probably forgotten.  But that’s OK, if we understand what it is teaching us today.

The world is more abundant that we know.  Not always, but too often the suffering that occurs is due to artificial scarcities: due to greed, hoarding, and the withholding of kindness.  Any decent society ultimately depends on more than natural abundance: on commitments to the common good, the general welfare, and sharing in both hard times and good times.  So it is that we ought to feel thankful for those artists and arts that are themselves acts of generosity for a public world.

Photograph by Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via Associated Press

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The Art of Violence in the 21st Century

One hundred years ago Italian Futurism was one of the leading edges of modern art.  (A retrospective exhibition is currently up at the Guggenheim and reviewed by the Times here.)   Futurism was distinctively bold, uncannily tuned into the machine age, and violently prophetic during a period of extraordinary turbulence in art and politics.  It also celebrated violence.  Fortunately, few artists today would do that or be admired for dong so.  But they don’t have to, as the art of violence has moved on.

Mexican crime victims, Vanegas

This photograph was one of the winners in the 2014 World Press Photo Contest.  It was not graced with the wealth of commentary regarding the winner, as one would expect of any contest.  It deserves more attention that it has received, however, and not because we need to fiddle with the rankings in a series of outstanding images.  The winner was a portrait of communication–indeed, an almost pure form of communication–and we ought to be talking about that, but the photo above is a study in both communication and violence, and we really need to be talking about that.

Ideally, communication is the opposite of violence: democratic civil societies are built on that premise.  The more that you can channel conflict resolution into talking instead of beating, maiming, and killing, the better off you are.  But not all regimes are democratic: for example, the organized crime organizations in Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico.  There, conflict leads to murdered bodies hanging from a bridge and dumped on the ground below.  As for the state that is supposed to hold the monopoly on violence and use it to protect its citizens?  We see only the concrete backdrop of bridge and highway, and police showing up too late to do anything except stand around like hapless functionaries.  Between impersonal infrastructure and overpriced policing, there is a gaping hole where civil society is supposed to be.  If anyone is going to be there, it is the viewer of the photograph.

The mob knew that it wasn’t enough to kill its enemies; the killings had to be displayed to the viewing public.  That is the logic of terrorism: using media coverage of targeted killings to intimidate whole populations.  But the photographer isn’t a lackey of the mob.  Instead, the photograph supplies enough distance and artistic framing to see not only the abject bodies but also the intention and techniques of display.  So it is that the photograph presents a choice.  Viewers can react with horror to what has been done, or they can react with horror and with an awareness of how they, too, have been targeted.  In the first reaction, the impulse then is to pull away from any further involvement; that would be just fine with the mob, as it makes the public square a barren, empty space to be fought over by the few armed gangs and the state (which, if the citizens are quiescent enough, becomes just another armed gang).  In the second reaction, however, you become committed in some small way to keeping civil society alive, committed to a solidarity with victims and all others who are being targeted.

This choice is reflected in two sources of overlapping artistry in the image.  Neither involves the iconography of Futurism, but a relationship between art and violence is very much in play.  First, there is the artistry of the killers.  Frankly, it’s damn good.  They clearly have a flair for a dramatic mise en scene, funereal allusion, and abstraction.  These are no longer merely bodies, but humanity, and those who killed are not thugs but masters of more than one underworld.  By artistically owning death, they acquire a dark power over life.  Number them among the artists of our time, and then be prepared to watch terror become a way of life.

Fortunately, there also is the artistry of the photographer.  The purple and yellow lighting throws the tableau into an aesthetic space, as if we are in an art gallery.  That changes the way we see.  The bodies now could be a work of art (they look very similar to a number of artworks that I have seen).  That need not minimize (“aestheticize”) their deaths, but rather goad us to think about how the violence itself was staged.  The positioning of the bound bodies, police, and spectators raises questions of who should be acting, who should be holding others accountable, and why inaction seems to be the order of the day.  (In respect to the challenge of stopping the violence, just how many might as well be dead?)  Together they ask us to think about how communication can be hijacked by those who would just as easily kill.

I’ve argued before that photojournalism is documenting the changing character of violence in our time.  Vanegas may have captured something important in that regard.  Once again, when violence becomes an art form, modernity is in trouble.  Trouble that may be of its own making.

Photograph by Christopher Vanegas/Vangardia; Third Prize, Singles, Contemporary Issues, World Press Photo Contest.

Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes.

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Judging the Photography Awards: How Much Art Is Too Much?

The Sony World Photography Awards shortlist has been announced, and some of those entries are being showcased in slide shows.  Doing so will build interest in the final decisions, but it also reflects interest already present.  That interest extends not only to the photos but also into discussions about how they should be judged.  Increasingly, the judging itself has come under scrutiny; as one example, one of the most viewed posts at this blog is on The Rhetoric of Prize-Winning Photographs.

To summarize the broader debate, winning photos have been declared to be too conventional, too safe, too much like previous winners, and too arty, while the contests have been faulted for elitism, cronyism, and selling out.  All this is simply more evidence that photography has arrived–that its status as a public art is being taken seriously.  Welcome to public debate, and by the way, what have you done for us lately?

Since the criticisms come from all sides, consistency is hardly a virtue, but what might seem to be contradictions need not be.  Can something be both explicitly artistic and safe?  Well, actually, yes.  Are you likely to sell out if already comfortably elitist or networked?  Well, yes, and by then it may even be second nature.  But are the criticisms always right?  No.  And even when on target, should they be the last word on what criteria should be used to judge photography?  Again, no.  Not, that is, if we really are going to consider photography to be an important public art.

So let me take up briefly the concern that photography awards can favor artistry over other values such as documentary witness, hard-boiled realism, formal simplicity, or critical provocation.  Of course, these are extremely important values, but we know that.  The question is whether photographs should win awards for doing something else; something like this.

Wildebeest airborne

This is a scene from the annual wildebeest migration in Kenya.  And it is a scene, a tableau, because this photograph looks very much like a painting.  More to the point, it has a lot in common with the landscape painting of the Hudson River School of Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, and others who drew on Romantic aesthetics to capture the grandeur of nature.  Using strong contrasts of light and shadow and movement and mass amidst a moody atmospheric haze, the composition suggests the enormous energies flowing through the land, water, herd, and sky, yet leaves their source or purpose illegible, as something that is too large to ever by captured by art alone.  This combination of awe and futility is epitomized by the beast leaping from the high bank, soaring improbably but magnificently through the air.  Perhaps he (or she) will stick the landing–I can’t help thinking of its similarity to an Olympic athlete–but the important fact is that the beast has to answer to crash’s law, the rough ground and uncertain fate of any animal having to survive in a harsh environment.  Ultimately scenes such as that are not about the individual, save for the spectator, who is to marvel the powerful forces shaping the earth.

The romanticism goes further still, as the photograph can be seen as elegiac.  The sublime offered the Hudson School a sense of consolation, for they were meditating on how nature was being lost to civilization: both displaced (destroyed) and forgotten.  The same may apply here: as the space and water left to the wildebeest becomes more limited, their migration routes disrupted, their numbers reduced further by poaching and other predations.  This beautiful photograph can hint at the dark finality of all of that, but its beauty also could be taken as a form of consolation, and with that an act of abandonment.

So why not just paint it?  The cynical answer is that painting would take more skill than photography.  If that’s your answer, go back to the studio and paint.  For those who recognize that we are not in a zero-sum competition among the arts, the question still points in the right direction.  Does the photograph offer anything that a painting would lack?  And does the explicit artistry of this photograph–specifically, its painterly quality–add or detract from the distinctively photographic contribution?

Frankfurt School theorist Siegfried Kracauer defined photography as being shaped by two generative principles: “there is on the one side a tendency toward realism culminating in records of nature, and on the other a formative tendency aiming at artistic creations.”  As he also noted, this tension generated aesthetic problems for the medium.  He could have added that it explains the subsequent division in the road between documentary photography and fine art photography, as each developed one media capability or the other while trying to avoid problems that could, if not mastered, lead to either paralysis or mediocrity.  But as Kracrauer correctly observed, the specificity of photography comes from the primacy of the realistic principle.  Although “a minimum requirement,” it is almost absolute: photographs are expected to show something that was in front of the lens prior to the creation of the image.  The more they deviate from this requirement, the more they become merely inventive, which is why fine art photography is inherently compromised: unlike the other arts, experimental optimization leads it away from its own medium.

Almost all photographs are not fine art photography, however, including those that are submitted to photo contests.  The habitus of photography is capacious, and almost every photograph taken has some value beyond solely aesthetic value, and almost every photograph submitted for an award professes to show us something, not just about the art, but about the world.   So it is that, outside of a fine arts context, the reality principle rightly holds pride of place, which in turn makes artistry suspect.  Awards do bring the tension to the fore, however.  If given only for documentary fidelity, the judges would soon have to be basing their decisions on the topics rather than the images themselves, or on purely formal criteria which, as Susan Sontag pointed out forty years ago, has become a “bankrupt” vocabulary for photography.  So what is to be done?

Kracauer recognized that the imaginative and realist principles don’t have to conflict: indeed, the formative tendency “may help substantiate and fulfill” the realist tendency.  In a nutshell, the judges for photography awards should be looking for exactly that conjunction.  Artistry can be quiet or explicit, but it should bring the viewer to see, understand, and work out a relationship with a reality that might be overlooked otherwise.  And, to get back to the question above, the photograph, because it is a photograph and not a painting, should be about a reality that exists regardless of human imagination, something having its own place and value in the universe beyond our limited ability to understand what that is.

Perhaps by imitating a painting, the photograph above can remind us that photography itself is not a mirror of nature, but rather one useful but still limited way of seeing.  And by hinting at the limits of representation, the image may also call up more emotional or intuitive responses to the world.  As Kracauer noted, the best photographic seeing “is of a kind which is closer to empathy than to disengaged spontaneity.”  That is the difference between depicting a sudden leap into the air, and bringing you closer to the beast.  Look at the photograph again and ask yourself, which is it?

Photograph by Bonnie Cheung/2014 Sony World Photography Awards.  Quotations from Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford UP, 1960), p. 12 ff., and Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1977), p. 136.  For the record, I’m not saying Cheung’s photo should win an award (or not win, either), only that it provides a fine example for public discussion of an important question about photographic excellence.

Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes.

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Fashion Week in the Big House

Sometimes you just have to say “No, not really, please tell me you’re not doing that.”

fashion week prison

And we all know the answer to that question.  In this case, it would come from whoever designed the Dsquared2 show for the Milan Fashion Week Menswear Autumn/Winter 2014 collections.  Italian prisons probably are not as bad as those in the US, but still. Are we really seeing fashion models posing as prisoners?  Didn’t anyone stop and think that maybe, just maybe, there might be something fundamentally obscene about pretending that prisons are just another place to strut your stuff?  Shouldn’t there be some recognition of the difference between affluent excess and stark deprivation, or between one of the more dangerous environments on earth and one of the most privileged?

At this point many people probably would pull back, shrug, and say, “What did you expect?  It’s a fashion show.  Of course it’s going to be over-the-top idiotic.”  I can’t do that, however, because I’ve already written 28 posts at this blog on fashion photography, and worse yet, I’ve argued that it is a weird form of performance art that can provide profound insights and prophetic warnings regarding society and politics.  Of course, not every image from fashion week does that–in fact, most of them fall far short–but the question arises of why some displays might be art and others miserable embarrassments.

There is a reliable answer, but we have to take an academic turn to get to it.  The key distinction here comes from Biographica Literaria, a book of literary commentary by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  In that work Coleridge distinguished between imagination and fancy.  Imagination was the vital ability of the mind to see its way into new perceptions, new creations, new syntheses; it was the human ability to create ideas, images, and relationships that had never existed before, and to do so in a way that brought us closer to the real nature of things.  Fancy, by contrast, was merely the mind at play with things it already knew: it was the mechanism by which we assembled and reassembled memories without regard for reality in order to pander to our desires.

To bend the ideas in the direction of photography, we might think of imagination as a way of extraordinary seeing: that is, how one sees beyond the horizon of ordinary observation or conventional belief.  Astronomy, for example, is an incredible act of imagination: by looking at a pale disk and points of light in the sky, people came to understand that the earth and the moon are planets–something that couldn’t be seen in any way until just a few decades ago–and that the universe consists of billions of billions of galaxies that will never be visible to the naked eye.  Likewise, photography has been a remarkable exercise in imagination, for by showing everyone people, places, events, and things they would never see otherwise, it has brought billions around the globe to realize that they are part of a common humanity living in a myriad of different cultures that no one will actually see together.  In both arts, moreover, the mode of extraordinary seeing brought the viewer closer to reality, not farther away from it.

These examples also demonstrate that works of the imagination need not be accessible to everyone, and that they can be misused to very contrary purposes.  But we knew that.  That important contrast for the moment is with fancy as it is a mode of all too ordinary seeing.  The sad truth is that when someone is being fanciful, they also are all too predictable.  Fancy is party hats and balloons and drinks on the sly at the office; imagination is the single, mysterious flower waiting for you at your desk.

You get the point, and so back to the big house on the runway.  I won’t rule out the possibility that it could have worked, but I know what would have had to happen.  A fashion show staging a prison should bring us to see affluent consumer society from inside the prison, or to see how fashion is a form of imprisonment, or how it is an adaptation on behalf of freedom to less coercive forms of imprisonment in ordinary life, or . . . . You get the point, right?  Whatever the display, it should not simply take stock fixtures from the prison and stock poses from male modeling and mix them up for fun and profit.

To conclude, as we academics like to say: fashion and fashion photography can be works of the imagination, but they risk being merely fanciful confections.  When the subject being appropriated for the show is one involving tragedy, deprivation, humiliation, violence, and everything else that lurks in the dark side of the criminal justice system, it really matters whether we are being brought to see anew or to enjoy habitual blindness.

Which leaves only one question: which side is the photographer on?  Does the composition simply feature the bad art before it or call attention to its failure?  Does the distance between camera and tableau suggest a similar distance from the reality of the prison, or was he just trying to include all of the set?  This isn’t really a question about the actual photographer’s intention, but rather about how you see the image. What do you think: see anything that strikes your fancy?

Photograph by Tullio M. Puglia/Getty Images.

Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes.

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Aesthetics, Morality, Politics, and Disaster

Perhaps not every drought is beautiful, but this one is.

Yangtze dried-up riverbed

The dried riverbed of the Yangtze looks like gracefully aged wood.  The undulating landforms perfectly match the sinuous water.  The great river must be powerful, yet here it suggests a quiet serenity, as if the basins were holding a gently receding snowfall.  Water and earth lie woven together; as they extend to the horizon, one can easily sense how the scene is the result of vast natural forces seamlessly, namelessly unified.  In the words of Wallace Stevens, “the swarthy water/That flows round the earth and through the skies,/Twisting among the universal spaces, //Is not Swatara.  It is being.”

Against such a backdrop, the human figures in the foreground appear small, tentative, and very temporary.  The motor is out of the water, already becoming useless as the waters disappear in yet another year of drought on a steadily warming planet.  This species may poke around for awhile longer, but once they’ve burnt enough of their ecosystem that will be that.  And the forces that made the river will flow on without a ripple registering our moment of disruption.

So how on earth can we say that the drought is beautiful?  Nor can you evade the issue by saying, oh, it’s just the photograph that is beautiful, not the drought itself.  Yes, there is artistry involved in making the photo, but the aesthetic reaction is to the material forms themselves.  Few would be dead to this tableau if standing there, but then light up with delight when looking through the viewfinder.  Indeed, no one would think to take the photograph at all, if not already marveling at the scene itself.  It’s not the art or culture alone, but a human capability for seeing the world, a capability that then leads to arts and other products of the human imagination.  So this drought can be beautiful, as are firestorms, floods, and melting glaciers.

And that’s a problem, right?  When the waters dry up, people suffer, and as heat waves spread people are suffering around the globe.  To then take a picture and admire the view would seem to be obscene.  Aesthetics and morality must be two very different modalities, and if the former can interfere with the latter, shouldn’t we be wary of that risk?

And we’ve even been here before.  Recognition that these two powerful dimensions of human being are in fact not seamlessly coordinated was one of the traumatic experiences of the twentieth century.  Nazis listened to classical music while overseeing genocide, and so Adorno drew the terrible conclusion that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”  (Go here for a good brief explication of the quote.)  If art could be used so easily alongside of evil, and worse yet to aid its operation, surely the only ethical option was a severe renunciation of aesthetic pleasure.

With the passage of time, it has become easier to reconsider the problem.  Perhaps the separation was artificial, a crucial construction for a particular phase of modernity, but one that is becoming increasingly untenable.  The two modalities are still not coordinated explicitly–as if, for example, bad would be ugly and good delightful–but there may be an ecology to human consciousness that we are just beginning to understand.

Instead of being wary of our aesthetic responses, perhaps they could contain hidden resources for solving the very problems they seem to deny.  Perhaps aesthetic and moral responses can work together like water and riverbed.

To see that, we would have to shake off the old suspicions that come from the prior distribution of our aesthetic and moral senses.  Unfortunately, those suspicions are still the dominant habits in most of the humanities and qualitative social sciences.  Not everyone, of course, and that list includes scholars working in political theory and in visual culture: for example, Jacques Ranciere, Frank Ankersmit, Roland Bleiker, Davide Panagia, Crispin Sartwell, Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, David Levi Strauss, Ariella Azoulay, and others (including moi).

Wallace Stevens knew as much.  In the same poem he says, “And these images/these reverberations,/And others, make certain how being/Includes death and the imagination.”  Disaster and imagination here are continuous, both part of that great stream, and perhaps each able to say something about the other.

So, perhaps the time has come to admit to how beauty is part of both the best and the worst that can happen, and perhaps particularly so when facing environmental catastrophe.  The effort involves nothing less that trying to bring all human capacities to bear on the most pressing problems of our time.  That can’t be such a bad thing.

It’s just a pity that it took so long, as time may be running out.

Photograph by a stringer for Reuters.  The poem by Wallace Stevens is “Metaphor as Degeneration,” and can be found in Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind, edited by Holly Stevens.  You can read an earlier post on the topic here.

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