No. 36 Pure Reason is Death

As post-Enlightenment moderns we worship reason based on empirically discovered data, consciously not emotion. The marvels of science and technology have only enhanced its reputation since the 18th Century rejection of traditional authority that was the Enlightenment. But pure reason is death.

Think about what it would mean to be purely rational; to conduct one’s life absent emotion would involve purely utilitarian calculations. If I asked why someone got up in the morning, and I would do so only because I had a logical reason to do so, I would be restricted to utilitarian reasons such as a need to earn money or at least eat something nourishing to permit life at all; I could not respond by saying I enjoyed the quiet of the morning or because my work was interesting and worthwhile. If I asked why someone chose to promise to live with a particular member of the opposite sex I might be told to ensure procreation or to share expenses or seek a tax advantage; the responses I could not give would be say because I loved the person, or enjoyed sex, or because I simply enjoyed the company.

If one were to drain the emotion from life, I would point out that there would be no need to procreate because children would simply be an economic burden. Life-long relationships would have little value because they would not serve utilitarian purposes. Ask yourself: Absent emotion why would I get up in the morning? What would I fight or die for since any cause would simply relate to existence. Physical comfort would not suffice, since it involves pleasure or the absence of pain, which is to say emotions. A woman in China died? One’s mother died? It would all be the same. Reason cannot supply a reason for living, only our humanity can, in all its confusion and conflict.

Art is important because, while it certainly may have a rational component, essentially it celebrates the mystery of life, satisfies a longing for meaning and the need to express the otherwise inexpressible truth of the human experience. 20th Century art was less than it could have been to the extent it tried to become a mere rational exercise, e.g., Cubism; in fact it often reflected the victory of art criticism over art; the autopsy of the dead rather than an expression of the living.

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No. 35: I hope that there are not many “pretty” pictures at my site.

I reserve the term “pretty” to mean something easy to grasp and familiar. A pretty picture may well demonstrate high craft and in fact may be even beautiful, however, rather than representing a new perspective, a pretty picture merely duplicates past representations of reality; it is a photograph replicating other photographs conventionally thought to be “pretty”, e.g., a photograph simply documenting a beautiful sunset at the Grand Canyon from the south side. A pretty photograph may be technically difficult of course, but if it does not reflect a new perspective on reality, it is not Art, it is art.

Being creative is difficult, and the more creative one is trying to be, the harder it is because to be creative is to stretch or even break the current paradigm of the artist’s world. Listen to a symphony by Mozart, and then listen to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to see what I mean: a new world has opened up. This isn’t to denigrate Mozart or the art of previous generations more generally as unevolved; it’s just to say that an artist like Beethoven is all about breaking down the old paradigm because for some reason he had something to say that the old paradigm would not let him say.

Great artists don’t even have to destroy the existing paradigm directly or intentionally, they can do it indirectly and unintentionally as well. Bach is a good example of a great artist who so perfected the existing paradigm that there was no space left, and someone like Haydn had to create a new paradigm to stretch his wings. Times change and so do paradigms. Thus, when an image is thought “pretty” it is usually a sign that the cultural paradigm it speaks to is becoming decadent. I hope my images are not “pretty” in this sense. I hope it takes a minute to recognize the subject, and in that minute to realize that a new way has been found to see an ordinary subject.

In the end, we create Art for ourselves. There was a nice editorial piece in the Wall Street Journal the other day by Michael Judge. He quoted a fellow student, Phillip Pace, writing about artful writing:

Let’s try, though it’s hard, to just deal with how the little piece feels to us when we’re done with it…that’s the root purpose anyway…we can drive ourselves crazy with Hollywood dreams but in the end what the writing really seems meant for is to keep us, in this way and that, strong enough to survive the new harsh dawn of another grim mundane February day…

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No. 34: “The Eye is Part of the Mind” or Seeing is not Perceiving

The true artist is doing more that presenting a work they hope will be attractive to the viewer; they are trying to express something about the human experience. I mentioned Leo Steinberg’s collection of essays, Other Criteria, in a previous blog. As he noted in his essay, “The Eye is Part of the Mind”: “Even non-objective art continues to pursue art’s social role of fixing thought in esthetic form.”

“The Eye is Part of the Mind,” illuminates the nature of the mimetic tradition of art. I think the average person believes that the history of art is unmistakably dedicated to the representation of reality as understood by the artist and their culture. This has traditionally meant in Western and Eastern Art that the artist sought to represent nature. Many critics would claim today that this Aristotelian tradition died in the Twentieth Century with the birth abstract art and postmodernism. Is this true, however? Professor Steinberg notes that:

Appearances reach us through the eye, and the eye—whether we speak with the psychologist or the embryologist—is part of the brain and therefore inextricably involved in mysterious cerebral operations. Thus nature presents every generation (and every person who will use his eyes for more than nodding recognitions) with a unique and unrepeated facet of appearance….The encroaching archaism of old photographs is only the latest instance of an endless succession in which every new mode of natural representation eventually resigns its claim to co-identity with natural appearance. And if appearances are thus unstable in the human eye, their representation in art in not a matter of mechanical reproduction but of progressive revelation. [emphasis added]

Thus, one argument is that as the art historian Bernard Berenson noted: “man seems to have begun as an artist and only in the last hundred years has he succeed in emancipating himself from art completely, exchanging the possible Phidias for a Ford.” The counter argument is that we have not ceased to mimic the natural, we’ve simply thought about the nature of reality itself and come to different conclusions. You must decide for yourself which argument appeals to you.

In sum, at the turn of the Twentieth Century I suspect that we in the West changed our view of what it means to be real as the result of two things: (1) the advancement of the industrial/technical revolution; (2) Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which demonstrated that there was no objective reality (which was then misappropriated by the culture for a variety of reasons and turned into a social/political theory).

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No. 33: Context Matters

“First Things” recently carried an article entitled: Leo Steinberg’s Artistic Vision by Dr. Dianne Phillips. This very interesting article makes the following point:

The fact that medieval and Renaissance religious paintings in America are almost always encountered in museum galleries rather than churches also facilitated their aestheticization and the inability or unwillingness to understand them as religious objects with a precise theological meaning. Within the museum, the dominant narrative is the development of artistic style. Religious art is displayed in the same way as modern paintings, encouraging the visitor to think of the works primarily in terms of their formal qualities and not in terms of the meaning they would have had to artist and worshipper.

She was discussing Leo Steinberg’s thoughts on the theological importance of Renaissance artists’ display of Christ’s genitals in an unapologetically natural way; the fact that this sounds inappropriate to we moderns is more a condemnation of our times than theirs. The fact that these works are regularly found in museums now means that they are considered as “art”, i.e., formal qualities are paramount. But these works were generally created for a space in a church, where theological content was most important–the difference critically effects how we perceive the work unless the audience remains consciously aware of this difference.

The point of this blog is to remind audiences of the import of context. I have emphasized elsewhere that I am very concerned with form, and that this approach is probably as good a way as any to distinguish “fine art” photography from other forms of photography. I did not mean to say, however, that the subject ought not matter. By necessity, a fine art photographer makes the subject matter important when he or she captures the data to make an image—it’s the nature of the medium. However, as pointed out by Dr. Phillips, the effect of venue on a work of art frequently reflects the current attitude about what art is and also effects, perhaps subconsciously, the attitude of the viewer in that all too often the casual viewer makes assumptions about what he or she is supposed to think and feel by the venue.

More broadly, the audience participates to some degree in creating the art. There is a wise quote from Samuel Johnson on my Nook cover: “A writer only begins a book, a reader finishes it.” Thus, the true artist shares his personal revelation with the viewer who reacts to it, bringing with them their own experience and judgment. Understanding this, I hope that everyone visiting an art museum or gallery recognizes and considers the fact that the artist may well have had a different venue in mind, as is clearly the case with religious art. Framing type can have this effect to a lesser extent, as just one more example. The effect of context of Art is just another example of how Art demands that we exercise our imaginations so that we can begin to actively participate in the revelation the artist had in mind, unfiltered by someone else’s opinion of the work, no matter how “educated” they might be considered—engage the Art yourself!

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No. 32: The Current Photographic Art World Is Schizophrenic

I confess to over simplifying the current condition of photographic art regularly  in this blog. While it is true to say that generally the banal is king, it is not true to say that there are no photographic artists who share the f-64/straight photography aesthetic because landscape photographers do. These artists think nothing of spending tens of thousands of dollars to obtain NASA-like technology. This state-of-the-art technology allows them to make photographs so technically perfect that they have reached the limits of human sight.  Very large prints are now the rule because the resolving power of a 60+ megapixel back seeing the world through a modern Zeiss, Schneider or Rodenstock lens needs the space of a large print to unfold all of its glory.

Thus we have the academy turning out socially conscious, aesthetically challenged photographers and “old school” landscape photographers turning out the most technically perfect photographs ever seen, with only “deadpan” devotees possibly bridging the gap.  I have no idea what to do about this. I do not consider myself a landscape photographer, in part because I’m not sure that they have anything new to say that hasn’t already been said by previous landscape photographers. How many outstanding photographs do we need “capturing the light” at Half-Dome? At the same time, I’m certainly no post-modernist from the academy. If one goes to exhibits regularly as I do, frustration sets in. I recently went to the Texas Photographic Society International Competition show in Johnson City for example. It was yet another assemblage of technically challenged work whose purpose I can only guess. Where is some really interesting new work? Why is no one presenting technically competent photographs that celebrate the photographic in a new way? How can we establish an aesthetic that can be appreciated as Art by the current viewing public? Surely no one actually likes what the numerous contests and galleries are throwing out at us.

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No. 31: The Fall of Man

Modernist and abstract painter Paul Klee said: “The modern artist places more value on the powers that do the forming, than on the final forms.” Necessarily for Modernists, mystery was fact, something true that was simply beyond human understanding; it reflected humility and an acceptance of human limitations. The two world wars destroyed the foundations of Western Culture and therefore the Modernist belief system. The Post-modernists arose understanding that mystery is only fancy, something that filled ignorance with imagination. Given this tectonic shift, they treat prior generations with irony and ridicule. Post-modern artists and critics also necessarily believe that beauty, truth, Art and progress were concepts that had proven bankrupt because they were merely artificial restrictions placed on artists by a failed authority in its desire to maintain the status quo. Post-modernist hubris and resultant cynicism has reached such profound levels that for them all is material, which is to say everything is simply the result of chance and power relationships. The logical consequence of this belief system means that there is no essential self and that what had been previously considered the “self” was simply an illusion covering-up what is merely a pastiche of roles.

Photography was slower to respond to this series of events, however, and thus until after World War II fine art photography remained the quintessential Modernist art form and continued to “lag” artistically until into the mid-60’s. It was then that photographic art became Post-modern, celebrating not technical virtuosity and a Modernist concern with form, but an anti-art approach that put subject over form and flux and ambiguity over an objective reality that did not exist.

Thus, photography has come a long way from the straight modernist photography of the f-64 Group. The banal is now king, as contemporary photographers elevate the commonplace, replacing the romantic with the material, the sublime with the mundane. This site attempts in its own little way to push back against this tide and to reassert older values because claiming that beauty is a species of tyranny sounds like something Screwtape might argue.

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No. 30: The Romantic Imagination

When speaking of Minor White, John Szarkowski noted in his wonderful book, Looking at Photographs, that:

As a rule, photography has not been especially generous to those of her followers possessed by the romantic imagination, but every student of the medium will have his own considerable list of conspicuous exceptions. The romantic temper is distinguished by its quickness to find universal meanings in specific facts….It is one thing to write about seeing the world in a grain of sand, and eternity in a flower, etc., and another thing to make a convincing picture of the idea. Photography especially has generally worked best when it tried to discover the differences between the world and a grain of sand, rather than belabor their similarities.

I confess that I have what John Szarkowski calls a romantic imagination. The “universal meaning” we are quick to seek and frequently find falls under the broad term “beauty.” In Blog No. 28 I mentioned John Armstrong’s wonderful book dealing with the subject of beauty, let me now mention another wonderful book entitled Beauty in Photography by Robert Adams because it discusses beauty in the context of photography and universal meaning. He opines that the proper goal of art is beauty and then states that the “beauty” that concerns him is that of Form (he capitalizes the word). He asks and answers: “Why is Form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning.” He continues:

William Carlos Williams said that poets write for a single reason—to give witness to splendor (a word also used by Thomas Aquinas in defining the beautiful). It is a useful word, especially for a photographer because it implies light—light of overwhelming intensity. The Form toward which art points is of an incontrovertible brilliance, but it is also far too intense to examine directly. We are compelled to understand Form by its fragmentary reflection in the daily objects around us; art will never fully define light. [emphasis in the original]

Mr. Adams then elaborates that art simplifies forms that it finds in specific, concrete, real-world examples, and that this is especially true of photographic art. Thus, photographic art necessarily concerns itself with a simplification of the real world through composition and is therefore built not out of the general, as is philosophy, but out of the specific and the real. He concludes this thought:

If the goal of art is Beauty and if we assume that the goal is sometimes reached, even if always imperfectly, how do we judge art? Basically, I think, by whether it reveals to us important Form that we ourselves have experienced but to which we have not paid adequate attention. Successful art rediscovers Beauty for us [emphasis in original].

This conclusion is similar to that of the ancient Greek philosopher Plotinus who created an entire metaphysics/religion in The Six Enneads to be able to express what he experienced when confronted with beauty. He was a Neoplatonist, imagining that man was an angel who had fallen to earth and that when he awoke he was stuck in the material world and suffered amnesia. He thought that deep within ourselves we knew this fact; that when we experienced a beautiful thing we were reminded of our home; that when we experienced a beautiful person we were reminded of who we really were. Whether one accepts Plotinus’ metaphysics/religious views or not, as an allegory it describes the experience of beauty as something otherworldly and is very close to Wordsworth’s perspective in a poem quoted in Blog No. 15, “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.”

The fact that photography is necessarily restricted to reality, unlike painting, sculpture or music, is its power, not its limitation. If an artist paints, sculpts or composes something it reflects his or her fancy to a great degree, but photography speaks to truth and cannot escape being tethered to the truth of reality. Thus, when a photographic artist simplifies, he uncovers what lies hidden in reality. This process is difficult, for me at least, because it takes imagination of the highest order to see it: as a man is, so he sees.

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No. 29: “The owl of Minerva only spreads her wings only at dusk.”

The observation by Hegal that is the title of the blog is all too often true, unfortunately. While no single person will ever do more than catch a glimpse of the creation, I can say that I appreciate the complexity and interconnectedness of things now more than I ever did as a youth. This provisional understanding of the interconnectedness of things is why I crusade about fundamental principles in Art. We create the Art we do because we believe the nature of things is one way or another. A very wise professor (Professor Frank Teti at the Naval Postgraduate School) once told me that all questions boil down to one: Is there a God? Although I thought this simplistic at first, as I continue to track down the threads of artistic thought, I have come to realize the wisdom of his observation.

Our culture’s silent hand guides us in certain attitudes about art. As an American I was given a general if unspoken antipathy towards intellectuals, Art and the like; we are a nation of builders, a nation of workers. As Leo Steinberg noted in his essay, “Other Criteria” (found in a book of the same name):

Americans have always felt suspicious and uneasy about art…. To Americans, the word “art” is the guilty root from which derive “artful,” “arty,” and “artificial….” American art since World War II is unthinkable without this liberating impulse towards something other than art. [Abstract Expressionism] appealed once again to the American disdain for art conceived as something too carefully plotted, to cosmetic, too French.

I am hardly French, but despite my cultural biases, I have learned that Art is not an industrial object despite the fact that I create it with machines. This blog wrestles with the idea of Art and its purposes regularly; I do not expect to reach conclusions; I only hope for progress as I enter the dusk of my life, and in that I am quintessentially American.

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No. 28: OK. I’ll discuss two photographs

John Armstrong wrote in The Secret Power of Beauty that: “Seeing beauty isn’t a matter of looking at one thing intently; it is a matter of looking at a lot of things together…. When we seek to explain the beauty of an object, we are actually trying to see its details, to grasp more fully its extent and character. The immediate impression is just of the most obvious aspect of beauty.”

I agree completely, but generally, I think it’s a dumb idea for an artist himself to discuss his work in any detail. However, given the nature of the appreciation of beauty sometimes certain ideas merit a bit of discussion to orient the viewer to things he might consider. In my case composition can get a little more complex than normal in a photograph, so let me discuss two examples.

First, look at “Still Life” in the “Warm” section of the Portfolios. Still life is a common enough genre for painters and photographers, so I thought I’d try my hand at one. The effect is better seen in the print, but I think it still works on a computer screen. The subject is a bowl of fruit, but the problem was how to make it interesting; I decided that composition was the key. First, I bought fruit at the store that was fresh and had as much hue contrast as possible (red, yellow and blue did the trick). Second, sharp focus increases the importance of any element because photographically, if it is in focus the custom is that it is a subject. In this case I made no object more important than the others by putting all the fruit is sharp focus. Third, I wanted a strong sense of three-dimensionality as part of the composition. To accomplish this I put the very round peach in what is traditionally the most prominent position, right-center, with the blue berries in the back-left and the banana at the bottom. This arrangement exploits color to increase the apparent depth of the image. Science teaches that every color represents a different wavelength of light and that each wavelength is effected somewhat differently by the curve of any lens it passes through as all photographers know, e.g., chromatic aberration. The lens in the human eye is no exception to this property of light; because the red, blue and yellow wavelengths are spread out a bit differently by the lens, they strike the retina at slightly different positions, which shifts the viewer’s perception: the effect moves the reds forward, the blues backward and leaves the yellow neutral in space. Thus, the peach moves forward not just because it is round, pushing out towards the viewer, not just because its right-center, and not just because it is physically placed on top of the blue berries, but because its redness accentuates the impression of being forward while the blue of the blue berries pushes them into the back ground. Take it all together and the effect is nearly 3-D.

Second, look in the “Cool” section of the Portfolio and select “Sunset Beach.” Compositionally, I am using the normative rules of composition that say put the subject up front and in focus to stop the viewer from simply noting a pretty beach scene; in this image, most folks react by first wondering what the thing in the middle of the image is (it’s a lava rock) because it’s the first thing they notice (as they have been taught). The second thing they notice after being stopped by the rock is the real subject, which is the color of the water contrasted against the neutral browns at the bottom of the image. A careful study of the print shows the full range of blues and greens, with lavenders and golds in the beach foam.  The striking colors are enhanced further by the use of a high shutter speed (1/2000), which froze the water giving the illusion of brush strokes. Thus, the composition of the image produces a tension between what the cultural rules of composition subconsciously tell us should be the subject and what our eye is drawn to by the pleasure principle, i.e., looking at those gorgeous colors feels good!

Visual art should give intellectual and visceral pleasure; something worth enjoying and worth thinking about.  I work hard to achieve these effects, and I hope that this brief explanation of the compositional aspects of two images was helpful. Whether I succeed in creating such work is of course up to you.

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No. 27: “Projects”

I’m for a manly image that stands on its own two feet and speaks for itself, not one hiding in a herd, hoping that the many will provide weight otherwise missing. So as an artist, I don’t like “projects” very much, and by a “project” I mean a tightly focused idea, like one I saw in “Aperture” a while back: empty parking spaces in Europe. Of course there are projects and there are projects; Edward Weston’s trek through the American West after receipt of his Guggenheim in 1937 was a project so vast as to not be a project as I mean it. Projects can be wonderful for documentarians of all sorts: photographs of old people, old towns or businesses, the politically alienated and the like. Projects of this sort can make powerful calls to action of the type that make the world a better place. Even photographic artists have a long history of doing projects to benefit conservation groups, etc., and I certainly have no problems with fine art photography dealing with political and/or environmental concerns as well as aesthetic concerns.

My problem with “projects” is that they put too much emphasis on the subject for the kind of art I make. A book or folio dedicated to photographs of churches of the Old South, for example, puts the subject matter front and center in a way that is antithetical to what I’m trying to do as discussed in many prior blogs (In brief, I am more of a formalist and therefore place a bit less emphasis on content in my images.). Unfortunately, now-a-days it has become almost a requirement to do a project to get one’s work published. “LensWork”, the wonderful fine art photography magazine published by Brooks Jenson, is explicit that it is unlikely to publish photographs that are not part of a project. Many portfolio review judges will be unimpressed if a “random sampling” of an artist’s work is presented, downgrading it as a “best of” collection, rather than a project of some sort, which is considered of more value.

Why are projects necessary? For example, how does creating 15-20 images of vanishing mining towns contribute to the art-worthiness of a given image of someone or something in the mining town? It may perform a valuable documentary, sociological or political function, but is it Art or better Art because it is part of a project? The artist does more than document something, i.e., provide content. If anyone thinks that a Modernist like Ansel Adams merely documented beautiful lighting conditions aka “captured the light,” they should look at the many “finished” versions of “Moonrise” over Hernandez, New Mexico to see what was really captured and how his artistic intent evolved over time; this is not documentation, but Art.

If we admit that most “projects” put documentation of subject matter first, then much of what is put forward is primarily documentation. This being the case, we must also admit that there is no great need to shape Art into a project unless the artist’s vision demands an emphasis on content. Perhaps I have now arrived at a pretty good way to distinguish “fine art” photography from other equally valid approaches to photography: fine art photography emphasizes form/beauty over content.

If you want to read a very rigorous theoretical discussion of the relationship of form, which he attacks as authoritarian, and content, which he supports as more utilitarian, I suggest: Art & Discontent, Theory at the Millennium by Thomas McEvilley. For those of you that think “beauty” is simplistic or out of date, I suggest The Secret Power of Beauty by John Armstrong.

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