Brief Thoughts on Photography
Justin Murphy
June, 2006
One
All of the arts, one might say, have in common at least this attribute: creation. The painter with his brush, the poet with his words, and the sculptor with his marble all have as their end, their telos, products that are personally crafted, assembled, invented, created. Photography, in this respect, is the odd child of the family. For the photographer does not create in the strict sense of the word; that is, the photographer’s activity does not require beginning with nothing and finishing with something. It is this consideration that has led some to wonder whether it even deserves the title of Art. But this question does not seem to be worth considering after one recognizes that it always turns on one’s definition of art—always of a most arbitrary width, to be sure.
What I wish to consider here, instead, are those peculiar characteristics that distinguish the photographer’s activity. For while it may not be an art of creation in the proper sense, it might be more appropriately termed an art of selection. The photographer would be correct, I think, to concede that creation is not his trademark and insist that his expertise is the keen taste of a discriminating eye. In my mind this amounts to no sacrifice in deserved esteem, despite whether it might push one outside the bounds of a probably too provincial definition of Art. If photograph is what I take it to be, and my abstraction of its character is not too destructive of its concrete nature, then we may be in a position to tease out some of its unfortunately under-explored resonances.
Two
The allure of the photograph is the prospect of defeating ambiguity. It seems to represent a chance to transcend the incommunicability of consciousness and the vagueness of language that is otherwise inescapable, and which locks us in a constantly imperfect and sometimes painfully inadequate manner of communicating. The photographer has the unique ability to share with other’s a view of things, to send a message as it were, with a degree of precision and incorruptibility unknown to other media. The photograph, in other words, is less contaminated with the distortion of interpretation. It offers us alleviation from the torment of knowing that we will never see the tulips at Sassenheim as Monet saw them (and how Impressionism seems to mock us for this!). The photographer who is asked why he chose his vocation may be wise to respond with the words of Eliot:
Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
It is not that the photograph is perfect in its containment and its transferability; it has both seams and alternative readings. Although any photograph will be interpreted in countless ways after it is taken, the source material, i.e. the concrete, material view within the camera’s vision can be passed from photographer to viewer with nearly nothing lost in translation. In this respect, the painter, the poet, the musician, the dancer, and any other artist cannot compete with the photographer. In no other form of art can an artist finish with a product that has lost so little, that has deviated so minutely from the initial vision at the moment of its inception. This purity of communicability, this stubborn fidelity is the soul and the impressiveness of the photograph.
Three
It is curious that the form of art that seems to promise objectivity in communication simultaneously highlights the pervasiveness of perspective and subjectivity. While a photograph is extraordinarily faithful in the transfer between visionary and viewer on account of its relative self-containment, it constantly reminds us of the arbitrariness of a given perspective. In a photograph, though a subject may be captured with precision unknown to painting or drawing, the photograph uniquely stresses the changes of experiential content that follow from even the most minute shifts of angle. The careful viewer of a photograph never forgets that had the photographer been even the slightest distance to his left or right at the time of the shot, the photograph would be an entirely different photograph. Perhaps Nietzsche was familiar with photography:
To learn to see—to accustom the eye to composure, to patience, to letting things come to it; to put off judgment, to learn to walk around all sides of the individual case and comprehend it from all sides.
This is certainly a demand of photography on its practitioners. The cruelty, however, is that the photographer may only circle so long until he must take the photograph. He must, at some point, select his perspective. Much like the moral philosopher, the photographer must plant his feet somewhere if he is to do his work; he must at some point take the photograph. The attempt to justify his moment of decision, to validate his perspective, distance, and focus as “correct” is the dilemma of the moral philosopher seeking to ground his prescriptions as sacred. Both have recourse to technical “rules,” but to what recourse do they have?