Lee Friedlander - New Documents (1967)

‘I suspect it is for one’s self-interest that one looks at one’s surroundings and one’s self. This search is personally born and is indeed my reason and motive for making photographs’.

Lee Friedlander (1970:4)

Lee Friedlander started to photograph the American social landscape in the late 1940’s. With a career that carried well on into the new millennium he has been published and exhibited countless times. However, here I would like to briefly focus on the 30 photographs curated by John Szarkowski, alongside work from Gary Winogrand and Diane Arbus, which featured in the New Documents show at MOMA in 1967. 

This show is particularly interesting to my own practice because of the wall label, written by Szarkowski, which introduced the show. It identifies the shift from objective to subjective documentary practice, which as we have seen previously, first given air by Robert Frank in the previous decade and was being pushed to its limits simultaneously on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, in Japan. It is an acknowledgment of the times where photography was discovering the photographer:

‘Most of those who were called documentary photographers a generation ago, when the label was new, made their pictures in the service of a social cause. It was their aim to show what was wrong with the world, and to persuade their fellows to take action and make it right.

In the past decade a new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach toward more personal ends. Their aim has been not to reform life, but to know it. Their work betrays a sympathy – almost an affection – for the imperfections and the frailties of society. They like the real world, in spite of its terrors, as the source of all wonder and fascination and value – no less precious for being irrational’ (Hermanson-Meister, 2017:3).

Friedlander’s style of composition could sometime be described as chaotically complex. At first many of his images look like mistakes or careless exposures. However, after a little bit of spent with one of his prints, playful juxtaposition and symbolism can be found.  Art critic Max Kozloff (2017:25), admits to being caught out: I used to think that Friedlander’s photographs of cheap, glowing TV’s (with V-shaped antennae) were testimonies of how boring and lonely were hotel stays for him between shoots. Then it occurred to me that he was providing an unsympathetic view of the medium that was usurping his market in magazine journalism.’ 

Writer David Campany, in his book On Photographs (2020) explains that ‘Friedlander has a deep love and acute understanding of the amateur’s happy accident’. In this vein, he hides his photographic talent under the veneer of a snapshot aesthetic. By including his reflection or shadow in many of his images. He demonstrated that he was unafraid to overtly acknowledge himself as a impressionistic photographer.

Japanese Beat - The Provoke era

The image by itself is not a thought. It cannot possess a wholeness like that of a concept. Neither is it an interchangeable code like language. Yet it’s irreversible materiality – the reality that is cut out by the camera – constitutes the opposite side of language, and therefore new thought.

Takuma Nakahira et-al (Ryuichi and Vartanian, 2009: 17)

Photographer Daido Moriyama was a beneficiary of the rapid economic experienced by Japan after the Second World War. This boom led to the availably of affordable, easy to use cameras and a population that was ready to understand what photography could be (Vartanian, 2015:28). After failing to join the merchant navy (Moriyama, 2013) and shunning a career as a graphic designer in the wake of a difficult relationship break-down (Moriyama, 1997), he found the freedom of photography in 1961 as an assistant to Eikoh Hosoe (b.1933). Shortly after he briefly became a member of the socially conscious, dissident photographic collective dubbed VIVO (Phillips and Munroe, 1999:9-11) and has spent the following 60 years thriving as an artist practicing, what Otto Steinert called, ‘Subjektive Fotografie’ (Fritsch, 2018:43) in the flourishing modernist tumult of post-bellum Japan. Quickly he developed a ‘beat’ style of shooting that is thematically comparable to Robert Franks. However, inspired by Nicéphore Niépce’s (b.1775-1833) photograph of  a view out of his window in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes (Shimizu, 2012:63), and built upon the early work of Shōmei Tōmatsu (b.1930 – 2012) (Baker, 2012:17) and William Klein’s (b.1928) ‘fluidisation’ (Shimizu, 2012:57) of photography, he readily embraced the hustle of the city streets to synthesise the conflicted aesthetic qualities known in Japan as Are-bure-boke, which translates to grainy, blurry and out of focus. Of Klein’s consequential influence he has written:

‘I was so touched and provoked by Klein’s photobook [New York] that I spent all my time on the street of Shinjuku, mixing myself in with the noise of the crowds, doing nothing except clicking with abandon the shutter of a camera I seized from a friend… I learned from his photos real experiences, not theories. Kleins images, which were rough, simple, and even violent at a glance, made me realise the limitless freedom, beauty, and tenderness of photographic art’ (Moriyama, 1999:12) 

The application of this avant-garde tenet became the vernacular for a time in Japan and is reminiscent of the pictorialism aesthetic of the early twentieth century.  Moriyama (2013) recounts his approach as being lazy and casual; his photographic eye glancing rather than staring at subjects as he passes them by (Taki, 2012:57).  This method of photographing that compressively shunned the modernist conventions of the time, which called for the production of carefully constructed compositions and exquisitely crafted prints. He understood photographs as equivalent, assigning no special status to any image, ‘copied images, or those of naked women, these have the same value’. (Nishii, 2013). He did not consider himself an artist, a title he defined as someone making something out of nothing. But he followed his believe that photography’s ’very essence does not create something from nothing… [it] has no originality’ (Moriyama, 2013), he is just copying something that is already there. He takes, rather than makes a photograph, while acknowledging and accepting the inescapable contradiction that a photographers personal aesthetic and memories will be imbedded in every image they take. This is an appreciation of the fundamental photographic problem of crossing between a multitude of perspectives and the disparate realities we all inhabit.

In 1961, Ken Dōmon (b.1909-1990) and Shōmei Tōmatsu published the Nagasaki Document. This then inspired the photographers William Klein and Ed ven der Elsken (b.1925-1990) to visit Japan, where their own raw style of stream of consciousness photography was adopted and adapted by the young Japanese photographers (Badger, 2008:123) including Moriyama (Ross, 1999:7). Like Robert Frank, Moriyama was a great fan of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road. He likened the experience of reading it to: ‘Flipping through a photography book that shuffled together pictures by William Klein, Robert Frank, Bruce Davidson, Larry Clark, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, and even Alfred Stieglitz and Ansel Adams in one volume’ (Moriyama, 2006:116). Moriyama recognised Kerouac’s stream-of-consciousness writing style as unorthodox but began to visualise vividly the journey being undertaken by the novels principle characters, in his mind the prose became images. 

In 1968 Moriyama was involved in a magazine that was published in Japan called Provoke – Provocative materials for thinkers (Nishii, 2001:4). He contributed to the second and third issues which focused on the erotic, and the potential of photographic communication respectively. His work here was militantly subjective, he continued to do everything in his power to challenge the notion of what a photograph was and what it had the power to do (Nishii, 2001:6). The magazine, which only ran for three issues, was founded in 1968 by Takuma Nakahira (b.1938-2015), ‘the most important Japanese photographer you have never heard of’ (Franz, 2015) (He burned all his negatives in 1973), Yutaka Takamashi (b.1935), Takahiko Okada (b.1939-1997) and Koji Taki (b.1928-2011). Following Nakahira (2012:34), who believed that ‘the process of taking photographs is not a representation of the captured world, but rather a searching and recognising journey through the vastly expanding and endless world’. Their radical agenda was clear: Marxist, anti-war, anti-establishment and rebellious (Felix, 2005:116). The magazines manifesto offers a clear existentialist explanation of what the founder believed photography should be used to achieve: 

‘The image by itself is not a thought. It cannot possess a wholeness like that of a concept. Neither is it an interchangeable code like language. Yet it’s irreversible materiality – the reality that is cut out by the camera – constitutes the opposite side of language, and therefore new thought. At this singular moment – now – language loses its material basis – in short its reality – and drifts in space, we photographers must go on grasping with our own eyes those fragments of reality that cannot possibly be captured with existing language, actively putting forth materials against language and against thought. Despite some reservations, this is why we have given Provoke the subtitle “provocative materials for thought”’

(Nakahira et-al. 1968 cited in Kaneko & Vartanian, 2009: 17).

Provoke aimed to break the notion that the photograph was always to be considered a document. The work they published used blur, grain and wandering focus to draw the viewers’ attention to the fact that a photograph contained little concrete information or a tangible narrative (Kaneko & Vartanian, 2009: 17). The magazine and Moriyama understood that their chosen medium had a purpose beyond mimicry (however, mimicry was not entirely dismissed as Moriyama’s Andy Warhol (b.1928-1987) inspired images of supermarket shelves, found in the third issue, prove); It’s aspires to appropriate a poetic vision, one that works to expose a verity that exists beyond language and to transcend the reality/perspective philosophical paradigm. They recognised that photography was contingent, and its unexpected nature should not be dismissed but embraced as an artform of sublimated chaos; sadness and pain metamorphose into something beautiful. 

In 1972 Moriyama published A Hunter (2019b). The monograph is the exemplification of the combination of photographer’s photographic philosophy developed over the previous decade, and his personal existential philosophy. The latter can be explored via Moriyama’s admiration of the controversial novelist Yukio Mishima (b.1925-1970), whose publications often addressed feelings of intrinsic emotional loneliness. The writer has been compared to the French existentialist thinkers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre (Phillips 1999:11). Moriyama nihilistic expressiveness is seemingly rooted in the thinking of this philosophical movement. And it was perhaps Camus’ solution to strife of a nihilistic existence rather than Mishima’s (Mishima committed seppuku [suicide]) that saw Moriyama taken by the notion of travel. Inspired further by Alan D’Arcangelo’s (b.1930-1998) minimalist paintings of American highways, he set out to explore the vehicular arteries which connected Tokyo to the rest of Japan (Baker, 2012:19) before embarking on a road trip across the rest of the country. With the understanding that ‘there is a lot of game waiting for [him] on the highways’ (Moriyama, 2019b:35) and identifying himself as ‘a hunter with a camera’ (Moriyama, 1968) who was going to capture it. He set off from Odawara City, to hitch-hike around the country with just his camera for company:

‘Again I will head out to meet the asphalt, in expectation of countless encounters with the outside world, and I can barely wait to begin the journey.

Why? There is nothing particularly great about the asphalt roads, neither is there much joy in travelling with long-distance trucks. The mountains, roads and factories have nothing noteworthy to offer either…

But the journey offers me the passage of time in everything small and big contained within; my inner world, changing every second, crossing with the outer world in unlimited capacity; the refreshing diversity of constantly overlapping new images… yes, that is the answer I will go with.

At any rate, I will continue photographing whatever abrasive thing I encounter in my restless travels along the national highways. My panoramic approach will, whether I like it or not, help me extend the variation of my everyday experience’

(Moriyama, 2019b:35)

With a sceptical eye he favoured investigating the things that bothered him in post war Japan, often centring on the Americanisation of his home country (Badger, 2008:123). This focus on an encroaching western culture is perhaps a distraction for the real motivation as Moriyama has said, ‘I was not against America, or the war, or against politics. I was against photography’ (Moriyama, 1998). His subject matter was not exhaustive and impossible to list, but he actively stalked the ‘sexual’ and the ‘nasty’ (Moriyama, 2017), he investigated the deviant things that surrounded him; ‘Briskly weaving [his] way through the avenues, every cell in [his] body became as sensitive as radar, responsive to the life of the streets’ (Moriyama, 1997b). By pushing photography to breaking point he actively captured a nations emotion (Vartanian, 2006:55) and by ‘looking for streets, for cities, for the world. In the process,’ explains Moriyama,’ I’m looking for myself’ (2017). Moriyama wrote ‘For Kerouac it was the typewriter; for me it would be the camera. Whatever measures it took, I wanted to go out on the road’ to discover ‘fragments of the world and splinters of reality’ (2006:121-122).  

Originally published in 1972 (the same year as A Hunter), Farewell Photography (2019), not only cemented his enduring notoriety but marks the zenith for Are-bure-boke technique. The book is part of his attempt to ‘get to the end’ (Moriyama, 2012b:36) of photography, a place where the constituted parts of his photographic adage took his images into abstraction and pushed the limits of what was considered photography (Baker, 2012:15). Thumbing through the book while referring back to my research on Albert Camus, it is apparent that the work is an embodiment of either a creative or existential crisis, perhaps even both. However, Sandra Phillips (1999:20) has observed that ‘Moriyama could not be called an existentialist in any strict sense, but this book is certainly informed by the spirit of existential crisis that faced his friends and associates’. The images are the result of Moriyama ‘brush[ing] through’ life (Moriyama, 2019:7) abstracted and raw; dust and scratches from the negatives remain as does the evidence of the film spools. Minoru Shimizu (2012:60) explains that ‘these are all expressions of a kind of “subtraction,” a means to erase the photographer’s self, his thoughts, subjective expressions and intentions’. It is usually not clear what the photograph is depicting, but that is the point, this book is not about denotation rather an exercise in pushing what can be considered reality by the photographic medium to its absolute limits. When discussing the soon to be published book in 1971 with Takuma Nakahira, Moriyama (2019:4) goes into more detail:

‘In essence, it’s about reality—the reality of Niépce, and the reality of newspaper photographs—as two opposite points. The former, Niépce’s reality, questions the act of capturing people’s and objects’ likeness—something that resonates very strongly with me… I’m thinking of the title “Farewell Photography.” It might seem like a somewhat ironic title, but it’s about my feelings of hate and wanting to say farewell to spiritually peaceful photographs, to photographs that show no doubt about what photography means, in other words photographs that lack all reality.’

When looking at both A Hunter and Farewell Photography we see Moriyama’s overt subjectivity at work. In a short film about his career, Moriyama (2013) recognised that ‘A photo is produced from a photographer’s specific perspective. However, when it is presented in front of different viewers various perspectives will be developed by viewers, which will enrich the content of the photo’ Moriyama has a responsive nature, his engagement with photography is near total. When he talks about his craft, he appears more sapient than many of his contemporaries, all of his senses are stimulated and he elucidates his passion, motives and methods with poetic flare; ‘I love to observe people in cities, in which an uncanny scent floats. I love to burrow in mysterious lanes to detect the unusual scent’ (Moriyama, 2013) ‘When you look at [my] photos, you can smell the city… Holding a camera lets you travel in a very real way. I can only shoot this moment. Now is all I have’ (Moriyama, 2017b). 

Developed versions of Moriyama’s subjective Are-bure-boke style emerged and came to define the visual aspirations of a whole generation of post-war Japanese photographers; to them ‘it was a way of depicting the reality they were experiencing… the real world looked exactly this way’ (Iizawa, 2018). 

As one of the six founders of the aforementioned VIVO Cooperative in Japan, Kikuji Kawada (b.1933) promoted an evocative, emotional and long-form approach to documentary photography. Inspired by Ken Dōmon, Ihei Kimura (b.1901-1974) and Hiroshi Hamaya (b.1915-1999) (Kawada, 2018:49) he confronted head-on the transformation of modern Japanese society and the side-effects of westernisation that the post-war American occupation inevitably brought with it. The work was experimental, polemic and symbolistic and resulted in the now infamous photobook of 1965; The Map.

The manner in which Kawada’s chooses to shoot conforms to the Japanese vernacular of the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s. High contrast, grainy black and white images. With an aversion to ordered composition. He, like Moriyama is the antithesis of the geometrically bound straight photography advocates working in Europe in the at period (Bresson et al). Kawada’s fascination with photography comes from an appreciation of the ‘Paradoxical character of photography: you can take photographs of reality and they become a lie, but you can also take photographs of lies and they become real’ (Kawada, 2018:50).

Later in his career Kawada turned his gaze skyward and in 2015 he published ‘The Last Cosmology’. Inspired by the apocalyptic sky-scapes of the expressionist painter Emil Nolde and a reading of Gaston Bachelard’s L’air et les songes he embarked on a 20-year project that eventually became Last Cosmology. Between 1980 and 2000, mini projects were published with ethereally titles such as ‘Air and Dreams’ and ‘The Last Sun’. It wasn’t unwtil the end of this period that it was curated into an exhibition and accompanying publication. 

Kawada was interested to portraying how the modern human existence has divorced us from the beauty of the celestial movement above us and the consequences of living under the infinite cosmological grandeur by focusing on the relationship between the terrestrial and the cosmic. He captured astronomical phenomena—solar eclipses, dramatic cloud formations, and the movements of the heavens. 

The Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki (b.1886-1965), offers an argument that could possibly explain the origins of the dark and shadowed visual aesthetic chosen by Moriyama and his contemporaries. In his book, In Praise of Shadows (1991), first published in 1977, he identifies how in images ‘there somehow emerges differences in national character’. Surrendering to the fast pace of the Western world following the end of World War Two, the Japanese character had to abandon the cultural path it had been forging for thousands of years. This forsaken character can be incapsulated by the traditional Japanese home environment which, even to this day, has somewhat resisted outside influence; It is dark place, lit not with natural or electric light, but candles or lanterns. Japanese art was designed for such environments and the shadows objects cast became of the upmost importance. Kitchenware, revered as artistic objects in Japan, is often crafted in a dark lacquer. The traditional food eaten out of lacquer bowels comes in many shades of white; in a dimly lit room the way the light catches the white food among its shadowed surroundings is considered a thing of beauty by Tanizaki:

 ‘The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends. And so, it has come to be that the beauty of a Japanese room depends on a variation of shadows heavy shadows against light shadows – it has nothing else’ 

(Tanizaki, 1991:29).  

Robert Frank

‘He arrives in Peru. He arrives in Wales. He arrives in Paris. That feeling; arrival for the first time. How things look. A whole new world! He commences his conversation with things. A world of grey areas rendered in black and white. His road is not one of exploitation, of turning people into mere props, stand-ins for an already subtle subtext. Whole worlds coalesce around a single detail: a hat, a smile, a hand. Picture this: his ear to the ground and his eyes on the margins, awake to the markers of a secret language of time’ 

(Penman, 2004:24) 

Robert Frank was one of the first photographers to effectively give consideration to creating a photographic project that rejected positivism why simultaneously retaining fidelity to his subject. This rationalistic approach informed his work that was to become The Americans (Frank, 1978). The book contains a body of images that sees the photographs act as concerns in an inductive reasoning exercise, where the goal is to reveal the deep-seated societal issues that simmer below a shiny American surface. By using the poetic sequencing of images in such a way that the viewer is signposted towards the hard-bitten conclusion shared by the photographer, who saw the aggrandisement of the cynical, but freedom loving America edification, as ‘the kind of civilization born here and spreading elsewhere’ (Frank, 2009:xix) . That is to say that America is a paradoxical, self-interested nation immune to criticism, plagued by inequality and racism, infatuated with religion, celebrity and the pursuit of the American dream. But also, a country that embraced ‘freedom, action, movement and above all risk taking’ (Greenough, 2009:2). 

Frank was a tenacious individual, early on in life he knew he had to get out of his native Switzerland. It was there where he was taught how to organize himself and photograph effectively and logically (The Genius of Photography, 2009). When he first arrived in New York in 1947 he made it his business to get in contact with, and study, his contemporaries such as Walker Evans and Edward Steichen (Greenough, 2009:3). The quiet and well-connected Evans encouraged Frank to get through the Guggenheim Fellowship application in 1955 (Guggenheim, 2020), providing a high-profile reference and help with the final drafting (Rosenheim, 2009:150). 

 ‘To photograph throughout the U.S.A. and to centre the attention on industrialisation. The people in the midst of this era of progress and the effect it has upon them. The aspirations of manual workers in comparison to white collar employees. Maybe the picture will be different in various places, or then it might be surprisingly similar in places far apart…

I don’t think that this should be a carefully planned trip, but that the photographs – with some text – should be a spontaneous record of a man seeing this country for the first time (except N.Y.). I feel that the U.S is the country that is evolving more rapidly than any other country and that my project is bound to be incomplete, but I am sure that it will be vivid and valuable report. Such a project can only be executed by complete independence’. 

(Frank, 2009:151)

The Americans is a seminal work and has been widely lauded (Powell 2009:xiv). John Szarkowski (1978:16) describes it as one of the three most ‘important events in American photography during the fifties’ and Bill Jay (1969:23) commented that ‘The Americans… must be the most famous photo-essay ever produced’. Frank’s existentialist view of America was ‘based on a sophisticated social intelligence’ (sic) and a commitment ‘to a highly personal vision of the world, and to the proposition that photography could, in aesthetic terms, clarify that vision’ (1978:17), a vision which ‘changed the course of twentieth-century photography’ (Tully 2009:44). 

Frank’s reckoning of America does not have a purely photographic origin. While embracing the ‘poetry of the Beats’ (Greenough, 2009:35) movement, he became an associate of the poet Allen Ginsberg (b.1926-1997), whom he taught photography (Sante, 2009:208), and friends with the author Jack Kerouac (b.1922-1969) who would later go in to write the introduction to The Americans. By osmosis Frank came to place their poetic philosophy of ‘first thought, best thought’ (Ginsberg, 1980:112) at the heart of his photographic practice. His work represented a converse approach from what would be considered a traditional documentary recording of a subject, by moving to ‘a more poetically adventurous and less story-driven counterpart to the mission of the photojournalist’ (Sante, 2009:202).

Kerouac described Frank as a man with ‘agility, mystery, sadness, genius and a secret strangeness’. In original introduction to The Americans he wrote ‘Anybody doesnt like these pitchers dont like potry, see?’, ‘with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world’ (Kerouac, 1978:5-9). The similarities between the two men are hard to ignore; both had a love for the road, and both travelled extensively in the name of their art. Kerouac’s intense beat style writing, in prose and delivery, is comparable to way Frank asks us to view his images in his book: At a fast pace through critical, melancholic glasses. In 2004 Frank (Bakare, 2019) told the Guardian Newspaper; ‘The kind of photography I did is gone. It’s old. There’s no point in it any more for me, and I get no satisfaction from trying to do it. There are too many pictures now. It’s overwhelming.’

Prior to The Americans Frank’s work had a more international flavour and is interesting to understand as it provides and insight into the development of Frank’s photographic philosophy that is instantiated in The Americans. In 1948 he photographed in Peru, the resulting images were first only complied in a small number of handmade maquettes, but in 2008 were commercially published by Steidl under Franks supervision (Steidl, 2020). In Peru: Photographs by Robert Frank (2008), it is apparent that the development of the photographers aesthetic sensibilities are being developed.  The book is a candid and respectful portrayal of the everyday and its participants that constitutes the soul of a nation. The 38 photographs are presented without introduction or exegesis, so the images and sequencing are truly left to speak for themselves. Alex Sweetman (2008) has observed that:

‘The front and back cover of Peru repeat the first and last images in the text and create a kind of cycle where the end and the beginning are continuous and time (modernity, European civilization) is virtually absent from people who live on the very margins of existence, and amongst whom we are one. To say that the photographs are up close and personal is to restate the obvious. They are, after all, Robert Frank’s photographs, taken as if from the inside’.

Between 1948 and 1952 Frank shot the images in Europe, the USA and Peru, for his book Black White and Things (1994) (see figure 25). Again, any thorough explanation or contextualisation of the work is absent from the publication. However, the book does open with a pair of poetic quotes, the first from the early twentieth century French writer Antoine de Saint-Exuopéry: 

‘it is only with the heart that one can see rightly what is essential is invisible to the eye’

And the second from Frank himself: 

‘somber people and black events quiet people and peaceful places and the things people have come in contact with

this, I try to show in my photographs’

These vignettes serve to align the readers psyche with that of the photographer and succour the softening up of the readers preconceptions, by opening a path to a new perspective. One that sees beyond the overt descriptive force of the photographs and into the souls of the subjects and their environments.

Frank also guides us through his work by dividing the book into three parts: Black, White and Things. Initially it may seem that Frank is contradicting himself by cataloguing his images based on their descriptive content, however the division of images has been dictated by the emotional state they provoke. The Black images reveal a melancholy and existential despair towards events beyond the horizon. The White images push back, they are positive and life affirming – in spite of it all we live to experience life. And in Things we are reminded not to hold on to the incorporeal, to see past the physical object perhaps it is a final reminder to look in the wake of his photographs when searching for their authenticity. 

Frank’s mechanism of dependably communicating his paradoxical flavour of optimistic disquiet through photography is perhaps most apparent in Story Lines (2004). Published as a companion to its namesake exhibition at the Tate modern in London, we experience, alongside the aforementioned Peruvian expedition and his road trip around the United States, his work of 1951 created in the British capital; A post-war portrayal of a smog filled metropolis, still cleaving on to Empire and yet to find direction in a world that has moved from Geo to Bio-Political paradigms. The fatalistic, but ultimately life-affirming homogeneity that runs through all of Franks work, reveals that his concern is often not the subject in the frame, but photography itself and the ongoing existential crisis he is enduring alongside the medium.

Seraphically Free

Below is the accompanying text to my photographic project Seraphically free:

I’m at 

Golders Green 

tube station

Evidence of last night’s succouring activities; the intemperate sex, single malt and cigarettes, are no longer contained by the long since unbuttoned shirt that grips my back. The garment, adorned with austere vertical stripes, fashioned to a masculine cut, has lost its form – an apt metamorphosis. Creased and untucked, a placket torn – what remains of this shirt is now the forlorn uniform of a lost man. The fresh perspiration of today’s fear is steeped in the pheromones of yesterday’s pleasure. Together they have saturated the once carefully pressed cotton. It is the revealing scent of my lassitude, I can’t move, my limbs are frigid. Commuters pass by, a seamless flow of energy with no nucleus. Unable to focus on any individual, a Gaussian blur has distorted my reality – where am I?  The hubbub of the station concourse and the din of the street outside, quickly evolves into an ear-warping paradox. A tumultuous, but inexplicably muffled cacophony – did someone ask me if I needed any help? – Can I not efface myself? Carbolic fumes, metallic particulates and fried breakfasts have amalgamated into a fetid miasma – I can’t catch my breath! A vacuum fills my chest, respiration involuntarily suspended, I need to exhale, a crescendo of internal panic, then... Reanimation in a quop! A palpitation with the force of retinal disturbance provides deliverance from this maelstrom. I gasp with a moment of clarity – ‘I’ve made a mistake, I am at Golders Green tube station, miles from home, unsure of how I got here, I need to get home, but how?’

At that instant, a cruel depression became a conqueror. A malignant anxiety, distinct from any previous dysthymia breached the confines of my mind. The disorder became fully somatic – tachycardia, hypertension, diaphoresis and myalgia began to stress my body daily. This unaccustomed presentation of physiological ailments became a hypochondriacal education in the malleable and contingent nature of how the reality of existence is perceived in one’s mind. At its height, the experience of being so misaligned from one’s own corporeality felt pseudo-supernatural. My subconscious and body had bonded together with anxiety, intent on developing a recalcitrant campaign of destruction against the remaining rational forces which once governed their function inside my head. 

This illness was my master, a sardonic despot with an insatiable appetite for dominating one’s cognitive functions. My internal monologue became a dystopian story narrated by another. The characters and setting were familiar, but the structure, plot and theme were refractory compositions. A healthy relationship slowly crumbled; she left. I was incapable of performing adequately at the office, marginalised; I quit. Travel on public transport became impossible; ten-mile walks across London to avoid it. I had lost any semblance of control.

Occasionally periods of coherence betrayed the malady. These fleeting gifts of unfettered cerebral bandwidth were readily received and utilised. Inhabiting a clearer, more familiar, reality was a rare but welcome respite. To once again experience rational thought, and a view of the world seen through the lens of a camera, provided a point of optimism as well as the time and means to address questions of a type I reasoned were at the source of my illness: What is the point in life and living?

This is the ultimate existential question, which invites supposition without the possibility of ever striking a satisfactory conclusion. My illness has taught me that we are perpetually shifting around in our own realities, only surfacing to present our temporal and spiritual constructs as rejoinders to one another’s varying perspectives. There is currently no singular reality to ground us. For all of our achievements, humans have not yet developed the capacity to instigate the methods of enquiry required for absolution here. In the face of answerless questions – addressed using the inadequate tools of intuition, faith, feeling, deep thought and science – it is fortunate then that the key to tackling my anxiety is perhaps not in the attainment of answers, but in the futile attempt of trying.  By using a metaphysical, photographic posture which I have called honest subjectivity, my photography is a personal, but ultimately doomed venture that has its roots in getting to the bottom of it all in a very personal manner. 

By addressing the essence of this question with the images above, I am confronting the people around the world who similarly encounter these challenging existential problems, without truly engaging with them. Instead they retreat to distraction, conformity or oblivion; by turning to god, submitting to celebrity, propagation, drugs, materialism, ego, community standing or social media engagement, and that minority who end it all in suicide. All these actioned choices represent the closing down of a route to an understanding of the nature of our undefined existence. However, all but the last option, at least, gives its subscribers a chance to break from a life chasing meaning and settle for a sentience with value; recovery in this rebellion is possible: I accept that I am a stranger in this universe, but I will to live for living. Suicide is no solution here, only a renunciation of life and the absurd. 

To move beyond nihilism, I use the act of photography to revolt against the absurd without destroying it. It is me staring at life in the face and saying, I know that nothing I do matters, that my life is a tale told by a fool, signifying nothing, but I am going to live life to the full anyway. A life with value without justification, just because I can. I am larger than my fate – I endeavour not to engage in the fantasy of the existence of a divine higher being, or to deceive myself with titillating distractions in an attempt to furnish my life with meaning. I choose to live for the sake of living; it’s an inconsequential ‘fuck you’ to the complete meaninglessness of it all. An existence like this, composed with an absence of meaning, is the embodiment of absolutely free existence and a valuable life. It is this choice that drives me to pick up a camera, to read, to travel the world – to value everything that I can. But the publication of this book is a philosophical blemish and a point of conflict; it exposes a contradictory conviction that communicating the value of life in this book might result in the application of some meaning to it, when I know that fundamentally it will not. But I digress, what I mean to say is that I don’t mean to be dogmatic here; a subscription to a philosophical treatise is not pure, it is a best aspirational and inspiring at the very least.

The photography in seraphically free is a peregrination without an end, furnished with complex thoughts which will evolve over time and space. The camera, when in my hands, objectively transcribes my construction of reality at any given time into a subjective and material medium. While peerless in its futile venture of sharing the pursuit of the understanding of the never to be understood, photography is ultimately strangled by an observing population who collectively possess only limited means of effectively translating the Gordian messages which infiltrate the images.

Tackling these philosophical questions photographically has been part of a salubrious quest to ameliorate my fractured state of mind, a process that has paved a route to a recovery of sorts. Photography is abreactive, a scientifically recognised therapy and spiritually cathartic, it is what C. Fausto Cabrera calls ‘medicine for the soul’. 

The experience of living with existential nihilism, infused with moments of acute anxiety and depression as I have described, is part of a chaotic mental gyratory familiar to many of us who are tormented by such cognitive contriving. It is a symptomatic philosophical standpoint that is neither the cause nor effect of a wounded mind. However, amongst the darkened clouds of a storming mind there lies a paradoxical power of eliciting a state of reductive stupefaction; thoughts are at times, briefly but sufficiently, cleared for an opportunity to focus on the ultimate question of existence. This singular enquiry is powerfully concentrated by Albert Camus in the opening line of The Myth of Sisyphus, ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy’. 

Honest subjectivity

I would like to introduce a photographic philosophy I have called Honest Subjectivity.

The growth of this methodological concept is contingent on sharing my understanding, that what I experience as reality is not in fact reality. It is rather, a construction within my own mind, an attitude, shaped by a unique flow of information, experienced and processed within my mind alone. It is, however, a relative concept, as it is one of over seven billion unique flows and their concomitant constructions of reality, that are all currently competing for ascendancy in the environment of evolving influence, I believe we inhabit.

Inherent in this acceptance, is understanding what I as a photographer perceives as real, what a viewer of my images thinks I perceive as real, what the viewer perceives as real, and – if possible – what is actually real; and this is, if anything is real at all. This proposition replaces any idea that there are truths to be communicated in photography, with only the transmission of elaborately coded subjective perspectives and interpretations. By making myself, the photographer, a palpable part of any work I publish. Subtly within the images or overtly in accompanying text, I substantiate my subjectivity, it becomes honest. 

Visual Poetry

But sometimes everything I write

with the threadbare art of my eye

seems a snapshot,

lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, 

heightened from life,

yet paralyzed by fact.

(Lowell, 1977)

As an exercise of getting to the crux of the analogous relationship between photography and poetry, it is interesting to read how poets have long tried to define their trade. In his 1840 essay; In Defence of Poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelly (2011) describes poetry as ’the expression of the imagination: and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven’. He contends that those who are in excess of language are naturally poets.  American Sculptor Horatio Greenough (1855:89) goes further and has described Poems as; ‘A mode of composition in which the highest degree of attention is bestowed upon all the parts consistent with the requisite degree of attention to the whole… poetry is the natural utterance of the more elevated or tender sensibilities and sentiments of the mind’. Replace ‘poet’ and ‘poetry’ in any of the above definitions,

The similarities and sway between poetry and painting are historical and well documented; Horace made a comparison between the appreciation of painting and poetry observing that; ‘just as [some] paintings can be enjoyed with a close viewing while others necessitate greater distance, so too should one approach a poem with a close reading or with a broader eye to the piece as a whole’ (Harvey, 2002). It was also Horace in his Ars Poetica, who introduced the term ‘ut picture poesis’ (Trimpi, 1973:1). Other philosophers have also offered, what are now well established, opinions on the matter. Plato also understood pictures, like poems ‘appear different when viewed from close up rather than far away’ (Barkan, 2013:42). In addition, Socrates observed that painting and poetry were often used by others as tools to get to the truth of a subject, but he saw the disciplines as mere mimetic representations of the truth that held little value (Barkan, 2013:38-39) and would be pleased to see poets banished (Leitch; et al, 2001:121). Aristotle on the other hand, read between the lines, and saw the art forms as a means to get closer to the truth of the matter (Harvey, 2002). 

By fixating on the competitive parallels of these two sister arts, we put ourselves in danger of creating a bond where one can be reliant on the other for success. All of these observations and definitions in this research chapter reinforce the similarities of poetry and photography. Their objectives are similar but autonomous, both are defined in some quarters, by an ambition that attempts to interpret the essence of being. The two arts focus on the stimulation of emotion in response to engagement with non-literal and often abstract work. ‘All the same, the impulse to “interartistic comparison” cannot be totally pointless. It must correspond to some sort of authentic critical desire to connect different aspects and dimensions of cultural experience’ (Mitchell, 1994:87).

Comparing photography to poetry may seem a little counter intuitive, as on the face of it the former manifests visually and the latter expressing itself using verbal language. But there is validity to doing so as ‘all media are mixed media, and all representations are heterogeneous; there are no “purely” visual or verbal arts’ (Mitchell,1994:5). We see this demonstrated with photography; photographs are seldom presented without some form of underpinning copy (Burgin, 1986:51) and such images as subject to ekphrasis in literary texts. Thus, the relationship between photography and poetry can also be framed as a relationship between photography and language, and is sustained by questioning, first; whether the limit of language can be found at the feet of an image? And secondly, as Leonard Barkan has observed in his book Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures, can language ever encompass the image by ‘giving voice to a mute art object’ (Mitchell, 1994:153)? ‘Every occasion when a (necessarily mute) human representation is celebrated for its speaking potential amounts to a reminder not only of the triumph achieved by the particular work under discussion but also of the devastating limitation under which all the visual arts operate’ (Barkan, 2013:12). Barkan writes from a similar position to that of Roland Barthes, on that supposes the communicative experience of art is defined by language, as I have previously stated in my post Limbic Resonance, this might not be the case. If correct this opens up new potentiality for all of the visual arts.

Language and Reality

I think about photography itself as a language. Like any language, it has its various dialects and accent.

 Alec Soth (Carroll, 2018:73)

Photography is a hybrid process of creating an image, its collaborative action is more elaborate than turning a thought into speech. As discussed in a previous post, photographers are by definition cyborgs; the product of a cybernetic union of the corporeal and enigmatic scientific endeavours. Our vision is developed, realised and enhanced by our accord with not just language but also mechanical and digital technology.  Lens’, sensors, shutters, eyes and fingers. This combination works together to create and disseminated photographic images into the chaos we inhabit. Whatever the whys and wherefores we advance for choosing this particular biomechatronic method of communication, a photograph is still a pattern of thoughts, defined by language and its creator, translated into and image by the creator and their camera, and then translated back into a different spoken language for consumption by the viewers thoughts. Rather than being able to transcend spoken language it would appear communicating using photograph in a way that is tied to language and has become exponentially more complicated as extra layers of translation have been introduced. These extra layers invite additional confusion with regard to not just language but semiotics, as in order to be effective they are both reliant on the cultural synergy between the photographer and viewer. Photography, from this point of view it would seem, is not a simplifying medium, but in fact the opposite. Is it then inevitable, as the Professor of English and art history, W.J.T Mitchell suggests (2005:105), that we lose of control over an image we make the moment the shutter is pressed? That ‘for better or worse, human beings establish their collective, historical identity by creating around them a second nature composed of images which do not merely reflect the values consciously intended by their makers, but radiate new forms of value formed in the collective, political unconscious of their beholder’.  

Michael Foucault makes the following observation, where substituting ‘painting’ for ‘photography’ addresses the problems of bridging verbal and non-verbal communication:

‘The relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visible, they prove insuperably inadequate. Neither can be reduced to the other’s terms: it is in vein that we say what we see; what we say. And it is in vein that we attempt to show, by the use of images, metaphors, or similes, what we are saying; the space where they achieve their splendour is not that deployed by our eyes but that defined by the sequential elements of syntax’ (Foucault, 1994:9)

The problems for photography do not end with the complexities of language but continue, as touched upon earlier, into what we perceive to be the very nature of reality. A passage from Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus (2005:18) succinctly outlines what is at stake:

‘And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I can feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes – how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multi-coloured universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realise then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art.’

From an empirical perspective; our pictures can only be interpreted in an alternate reality to the one in which they were created. Be it the one that belongs to someone else viewing the picture at a particular time, or by ourselves, any time after the photograph was taken. We are infinitely, inescapably and continually inhabiting a new reality – realities that are defined empirically by special relativity and quantum mechanics. Reality then exists in an infinite amount of possible states (Greene, 2012) across an infinite time scale. Philosophically speaking, all of what we perceive can be doubted (Russell, 1998 1-6). We can therefore safely say that the world that each of us perceives differently in our own minds, the truth, a universal reality or any other postulation imbued in an image for another’s understanding is nothing but a chimera that is positioned only a step away from a Berkeleyan denial of Matter altogether (Berkeley, 1996). This Will-o’the-wisp is still, to many photographers, what a Siren’s call is to a sailor; something insatiable. Except that instead of being drawn to wreck, many photographers still subscribe to an outdated positivist compulsion to describe the camera in their hand as an independent ’recording and exploring instrument’ (Kracauer, 2014:63). These assertions are demonstrably false and contribute to a photographic illiteracy, as old as the medium, that is still widespread today (Scott, 2017; Kracauer, 2014:74). Alternatively, a statement acknowledging that their work is what they perceive to be reality, truthful or objective would be beneficial to the universal understanding of photography. But this rarely happens, as many photographers are keen to avoid this recognition, as it would represent an admission that their promise of communicating unequivocal facts and truths in this medium is nothing but ghost milk.

As truth is measured by reality, our perceptions of reality will define our appraisal of truths presented to us. We are therefore stuck in what, the American Philosopher, Ralph Barton Perry calls the egocentric predicament (Kitchel, 1918: 330-331); where our closest contacts with reality are just mental representations that are defined by the language we speak and conceptual scheme we have adopted. ‘We can never get at the thing apart from the Ego and the cognitive relation between it and the thing. We can never consider an object at all without getting into some kind of thought connection with it’ (Kitchel, 1918: 330). This world that each of us perceives differently in our own minds has been called the Phaneron and is described in detail by Harvard University’s Charles Sanders Peirce (1931:284). It is ‘the collective total of all that is in any way or in any sense present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not’. As we head towards the subjective idealist view of the world, promoted by George Berkeley, where nothing exists before it is perceived. A junction appears between this thinking and Quantum Mechanical conception of the Superposition Principle that allow an electron, or any subatomic particle, to be in an infinite number of places at the same time until it is observed. Essentially the reality of the particle is intertwined with the act of its perception. As a consequence, it would be onerous to reach a conclusion about reality that is not solipsistic, when proving an existence outside of the mind is so elusive. So, if nothing else, we have the Cartesian Cogito to thank for recognising that maybe there is one truth in the universe and that is the truth that we at least exist in our own minds.

I have already touched upon notions of reality, perception, truth and language. And after reading W.J.T Michell (1994:281) – who has observed that ‘the relation of photography and language is a principle site of struggle for value and power in contemporary representations of reality; it is the place where images and words find and lose their conscience, their aesthetic and ethical identity’ –  I would like to look into these concepts in a little more detail. In The Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell (b.1872-1970) (1998:1) has observed that ‘in daily life, we assume as certain many things which, on closer scrutiny, are found to be so full of apparent contradictions that only a great amount of thought enables us to know what it is that we really may believe’.  Russell goes on to give his own example that relates to the colour and shape of a table viewed from different angles, I would like to give an alternative example that is a little more relevant to the themes of my research:

If you were to experience something but could not understand or express the experience with words then you would not be able to describe your experience to other people, subsequently no one would ever be able to know what you experienced. If this was true would it also mean that you could not understand the experience yourself? The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (b.1889-1951) has proposed the following metaphorical thought experiment in this book Philosophical Investigations (2009) in which he suggested that we imagine a group of people who all have a box, inside each box there is thing that everyone calls a Beetle. However, in the context of this though experiment no-one is allowed to look inside anyone else’s box, they can only look inside their own and they are only allowed to talk about what is inside their box. So, the question is, can anyone ever know if anyone actually has a beetle in the box? Any can anyone know what anyone else’s beetle actually looks like if they do. Everyone can of course describe what is in their box, but they can only describe what is in their box using words that are shared and universally understood by the members of the group, which in this case is ‘Beetle’.

According to Wittgenstein, the thing inside of the box cannot be meaningfully talked about using the word Beetle because no one can ever confirm what anyone means by beetle. As a result, the word ‘Beetle’ can only mean the thing that is in the box but doesn’t and cannot necessarily describe the thing that is actually in anyone’s box. The analogy is used to suggest that the felt states and sensations that occur in our minds, things like smell, love or happiness and so on are things that no one can ever communicate sufficiently to share and reveal their experience to others. I can never see your ‘Beetle’ and you can never see mine. When we attempt to think and communicate about the ‘Beetle’, the word has to be a word that everyone understands or can be taught for the word to have any meaning. For Wittgenstein language is entirely social and therefore contingent. This theory is known as the Private Language Argument and proposes that no language is understandable if it is solely to one individual rather language is only formed through shared use among the community of others. Thus, the sensation that something might exist exclusively to oneself, but it can never be understood in terms of language exclusively to one’s self. So, we can never know if anyone experiences anything the same way we do, even if everyone experiences it with the same words, we can only ever assume. Everyone is therefore living in their own interpretation of reality that is impossible to share using language.

But what if we can offer a rebuke to the existentialist Albert Camus (b.1913-1960) (2005:9) who said that ‘Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying’ and use photographs to aid or replace communication through a spoken language? Can we be less vague and transcend the limitations of absurdity and the metaphysical mind that Camus sees as ‘irreducible’ to get to the truth of what we think we want to say? Could a photograph go further and communicate one’s experience of emotions more effectively than spoken language? Can a photograph even act independently of spoken language? Perhaps it can even act as intermediary for an alternative method of human interaction; human limbic resonance? 

It appears that I am not alone in the photographic world in following Camus; The Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama (b.1938) (2019, 4-5), addresses meaning and value here:

‘Photography doesn’t have that kind of worship-y, religious-like value attached to it—photographs don’t have that value as single, crafted works of art. As long as you don’t convince yourself that they do, you can just press the shutter button then a photograph will result from that, no matter what ups and downs you’re going through. This is entirely theoretical though… If there’s no meaning to photographs after all—or rather, to life—then that’s all we have left to do anyway, isn’t it.’

Cloaked in the façade of road trips and the concept of pan-humanism, the photography in this master’s project sees the emergence of nihilistic existentialism as the veridical inspiration & subject matter.  It is not a diaristic documentation of a sublunary journey; the places photographs are taken are concomitant to the cause as the journey is in actual fact a personal and metaphysical one, undertaken and shared as a reaction to the bite of this nihilistic existentialism affliction. 

Perspective and Reality

When a photograph is being composed through the viewfinder, the photographer is putting a frame around a very small section of the world. However, when viewing photographs, we often look through them as if they are worlds in and of themselves.

(Dean Knessmann 2014:177)

Albert Camus observed that ‘true knowledge is impossible. Solely appearances can be enumerated, and the climate make itself felt’ (2005:10) As a photographer it is atmospheric conditions and not the truth we share. Understanding that a photograph gives us the opportunity to express our thoughts, views and impressions of and on life, truth and reality with only verisimilitude would be a good place to start an unadulterated photographic endeavour – We may never objectively know truth or reality beyond our own perceptions, but we can perhaps find security in the sharing of our subjective and absurd worlds. 

A photograph is confined to communicating only the perceived realities imbued in the abstraction of actuality found on its surface. Viewers of a photographic work are therfore directed by the presented images towards impressions of truths, and not actual truths. This is a far cry from implied certitude of fact so often attributed to the medium. The invention and development of photographic science is clearly documented (Newhall, 1982: 4-58), but how it can be seen to communicate a feeling is a metaphysical problem and one I would like to explore further.

Following Hume and Kracauer, the art critic and writer Andy Grundberg, in his essay The Crisis of the Real, reminds us that ‘our perceptions only tell us about what our perceptions are, not about the true conditions of the world’ (1999:5). Thereafter the reality of existence each one of us experiences is unique.  So, to investigate and reflect on a chosen cause, idea or feeling, and since all photography, however intentioned, represents a reflective practice that searches for objectivity in a world of subjective interpretations (Menon, Sinha & Sreekantan, 2014:172).  Using photography as a tool of understanding or inclusivity necessitates a phenomenological approach that is appreciative of these hermeneutical issues. As the photographer cannot be removed from the act of picture taking, it is possibly the only fitting approach (not withstanding hermeneutics). 

Photographic images play a powerful role in our perception of reality; they are also part of our reality acting as phenomena in themselves, they simultaneously define and evidence our perception of reality. Nevertheless, photography has a tender underbelly, its vulnerability is that the power of images is widely underestimated and misunderstood, thus leaving their role in society as an easily manipulated and highly effective governing apparatus. The image as proof is now the antithesis to the scientific method; in the wrong hands it has the power to undercut the fundamentals of existence, truth and reality that the academic and scientific community is striving to prove. The photograph has become a dangerous battleground of reality.

After the acceptance of the inherent phenomenological nature of photography and following the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty  (2002) – who proposed the human form should be understood not just as a biological soma, but as the body which centres one’s position and experience within the world – it is possible to create, what he might describe as a photographic Capta. Whereby individual photographs become visualised, interpretations of an individual’s conscious experience. A curated collection of deliberately Captic photographs can then be considered a phenomenological investigation; a transcendental ‘study of essences’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2002:vii) that can be used as a supplement towards our understanding of the nature of things. Consequently, rather than overtly describing a subject, work of this type is employed as a visually pensive approach which moves the viewer towards an understanding about the character of a given subject. Or, I should say, at least attempts to communicate that comprehension: We will have created a set of pictures that defines the photographer’s reality as they perceive it for others to interpret. 

Here I am reminded that Robert Adams (1996:24), who has written that ‘the job of the photographer… is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope’. I wish to embrace this mediation in my work by further remembering that there is no absolute truth in an image and that photography is as highly contingent as the concept of reality itself is. And in lieu of the possibility of introducing a control into my photographic practice; there is a seemingly infinite number of obstacles between what a photograph perceives as real, what a viewer thinks the photographer perceives as real, what the viewer perceives as real and if possible, what is actually real; and this is if anything is real at all.

Limbic Resonance

The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The entities, which seem to serve as elements in thought, are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined’

Albert Einstein (Lyons, 2014:201)

On the surface a photograph is just a pattern of thoughts, defined by language and its creator, translated into and image by the creator and their camera, and then translated back into a spoken language for consumption by the viewers minds. Rather than being able to transcend spoken language it would appear communicating using photograph in a way that is tied to verbalised language and has become exponentially more complicated as extra layers of translation have been introduced. These extra layers invite additional confusion with regard to not just language but semiotics, as in order to be effective they are both reliant on the cultural synergy between the photographer and viewer. 

However, I believe that a photograph, particularly portraiture, has the ability to go further and bypass spoken language entirely using a mechanism called limbic resonance.

Defined as:

‘a symphony of mutual exchange and internal adaptation whereby two mammals become attuned to each other’s inner states. It is limbic resonance that makes looking into the face of another emotionally responsive creature a multi-layered experience. Instead of seeing a pair of eyes as two bespeckled buttons, when we look into the ocular portals to a limbic brain our vision goes deep: the sensations multiply, just as two mirrors placed in opposition create a shimmering ricochet of reflections whose depth recede into infinity. Eye contact, although it occurs over a gap of yards, is not a metaphor. When we meet the gaze of another, two nervous systems achieve a palpable and intimate apposition’. (Lewis; Amini; Lannon, 2000:63)

Here the camera acts as one half of a cybernetic cryptograph, it buries the innermost intentions, thoughts and emotions of its human collaborator into a photograph. But there no means to accurately unencode it’s intended message, it can only be experienced and felt, there is no verbal explanation. The viewer is left to lean on innate ability to navigate a multitude of interconnected assumptions, perspectives and definitions of reality in order to get to the bottom of the image. 

The work of Lewis, Amini and Lannon that defined limbic resonance, can be found in their book A General Theory of Love (2000). It follows on from Lorenz’s (1935) study of ‘imprinting’ in ducklings and Bowlby’s (1969) work on ‘attachment’, whereby they both developed the belief that the close relationship between mother and infant was related to the physical security of an infant. Limbic resonance was conceived as a theory that went beyond this simplistic view, taking the fundamentals of attachment towards the centre of what it means to be a human being and situating the relationship as essential to successful human interaction and communication later in life. The seat of limbic resonance is found in the brain, which can be divided into 3 major structures (Sinek, 2010). On the outside we have the Neo-Cortex – the Homo Saipan brain, the area where we analyse things in a rational way and where language is understood. The middle two sections predominantly make up the limbic system.  Among other vital functions, this arrangement is the source of our feelings, it controls behaviour and decisions and has no capacity for using or understanding language, it is the source of that gut feeling you sometimes get. It is where limbic resonance receives and projects an emotional state. Although  empathy is placed at the centre of ‘mammalian development, limbic regulation and social organisation’ (Farrow & Woodruff, 2007:51), it is happiness, fear, sadness, disgust, anger, surprise and all other feelings derived from these six basic sensations (which includes empathy) which stimulate activity in particular areas of the limbic brain.

‘Facial expressions are powerful nonverbal displays of emotion that signal valence information to others and contain information that is vital in the complex social world’ (Fusar-Poli, et al, 2009:419). This has been primarily demonstrated in mother-infant relationships, limbic resonance is so fundamental to life, that a child, nurtured in every other way, will die if it is denied this close relationship with its mother. Therefore, to call limbic resonance an asset of extrasensory perception function would be erroneous. This is not telepathy, but a documented 2nd line sense that unconsciously uses information from our basic senses, to give us the ability to detect and analyse the internal state of other mammals by utilising the potential of complex hormonal relationships. ‘Emotionality is [therefore] the social sense organ of limbic creatures’ (Lewis; Amini; Lannon, 2000:62). It is a communicative function that antedates language by allowing our nervous system to sync with those around us. In Human beings this relationship goes further; what goes on in the limbic mind perceived by the (Neo-Cortex) conscious mind – this is why we can verbalise our emotions to some degree. One the one hand it is physiological; limbic regulation explains (Brehony, 2003:26) why women, who spend a large amount of time in each other’s company, often see that their menstrual cycles synchronise. On the other, it is psychological, it is why we fall in love and feel heart break. Limbic resonance is responsible for ‘the wordless harmony we see everywhere but take for granted… Limbic states can leap between minds, feelings are contagious, while notions are not… That’s why a movie viewed in a theatre of thrilled fans is electrifying, when its living room version disappoints—it’s not the size of the screen or speakers—it’s the crowd that releases storytelling magic, the essential, communal, multiplied wonder ’ (Lewis; Amini; Lannon, 2000:64).

Could limbic resonance open up new thinking regarding the interpretation of a photograph by explaining or contributing to what Roland Barthes (2000:27) describes as the ‘punctum’? If the source of art and therefore photography can be attributed to emotions and the limbic system, is it possible for a photograph to be embedded with information that can communicate directly and unconsciously to another limbic brain? – This mechanism I propose would be akin to the limbic minds of the photographer and the viewer having unintentionally developed their own for of end-to-end encryption that prevents their own consciousness and logic from eavesdropping on what an image is communicating.

In his book Camera Lucida, the French philosopher charts his analysis of why he felt an attraction to certain photographs. He states that ‘this photograph which I pick out and which I love has nothing in common with the shiny point which sways before your eyes and makes your head swim; what it produces in me is the very opposite of hebetude; something more like an internal agitation, an excitement, a certain labor too, the pressure of the unspeakable which wants to be spoken’ (sic,18-19). Barthes sees many photographs as inert, describing them as unary photographs, which he derives only a passing interest. By describing these images as possessing Studium he infers that they act as a docile but culturally contingent, connection to the subject. It allows him to ‘participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings [and], the actions’ (sic, 26) depicted. He understands the photographer’s intentions but can only experience the photograph using language from his own perspective. However, there are occasions when something disturbs the studium; A photograph is afforded a punctum by the person who is serendipitously touched by it. It shoots out of the image ‘like an arrow’, poignantly pricking the viewer with punctuated wounds, stimulating emotions without warning. Experiencing a punctum is a highly personal, but intertextual (Werner, 2004:64) and non-transferable experience that is tied to the passing of time; the ‘that-has-been’ (sic, 96). No prior analysis of the photograph at its source can illicit it, but existing personal memories along with ‘shutting your eyes… to make the image speak in silence’ (sic, 55), can act as catalysts to discovering an equivalence. There is no code to decipher here as the provenance of the prick inflicted by the punctum cannot be named. The punctum can very often be traced to a particular object depicted or feature found in a photograph; it’s subtle power of expansion—beyond the representing of the literal—is provided not by a photographers intended juxtaposition, clever composition or camera trickery, but by the metonymic nature of the said object or feature found within the image.

Barthes recognised that it is possible for a photographer’s emotion to be projected onto the photographs they take, that they could be material incarnations of eidetic images found in the photographer’s mind, and that as well as looking at a photograph, a photograph could look back at him. He also acknowledges that ‘the photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me… a sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze’ (sic, 80-81). Bathes therefore recognises the potential of a relationship, that transcends language, between a subject found in a photograph, the photographer, the photograph and the viewer of the photograph but did not apply this thinking to his mediations on the origins of the punctum. W.J.T Mitchell (2005:127) goes further that Barthes while exploring the historically president of ‘offending images’; he applies independent activity to images that are ‘fetishes, idols and totems’, by describing how they can ‘magically’ communicate with a viewer and that images are ‘not merely a transparent medium for communicating a message but something like an animated, living thing, an object with feelings, intentions, desires, and agency’ and are to be seen as ‘pseudopersons’.

In response I would suggest that the resulting punctum that wounds Barthes, or the apparently unanalysable air of a face he is often faced with in an photograph, is not just the result of his own serendipitous projections onto an image as he proposes, but a consequence of limbic minds meeting and transmitting emotion to one another through a photograph? While accepting Michell’s premise that images appear to take on a life of their own, I reject his notion that images have their own agency as some kind of magical construct, as discussed before they are cybernetic constructions and are never fully independent of the human creator even when the creator has lost control, the genesis cannot be uncoupled. The photograph or image in my interpretation of the punctum is not mono-directional or autonomous but would act as a limbic intermediary. However, it is not to be interpreted as being animistic; it is insentient, merely a cybernetically constructed conduit. 

Paul Virilio (1989:8) helps to explain this chemical process by highlighting that those emotions that have been stimulated in the act of perception ‘make themselves felt through chemical, neurological processes in the sense organs and the central nervous system, affecting human reactions and even the perceptual identification and differentiation of objects.’ – A photograph is therefore the site of transmission between bodies that is necessarily articulated by an unseen chemical interaction. A photograph here must be impregnated with a hormonal stimulus, that transcends ekphrasis, tropes, language, semiotics and culture; hidden, save for the primary senses of a receptive and acquiescent subconscious primitive mind that is disposed to feel beyond what can be described and consciously experienced. Creating and viewing photographs are acts of perception; they are biologically stimulating exercises that amend our organic constitution, animating mumchance emotions that could not have been triggered or communicated by any other means. 

Photographic Posture

‘Camera work theoretically lies between fiction, with its narrative techniques, and painting, with its metaphoric ones.’

Max Kozloff  (Hermanson-Meister, 2017:29)

John Szarkowski (b.1925-2007) (1978:11) famously suggested ‘that there is a fundamental dichotomy in contemporary photography between those who think photography as a means of self-expression and those who think it as a method of exploration’. However, this statement is not intended to demonstrate an unalloyed divide in photographic practice but to be used as an analytical device which shows that photography is in fact; ‘a continuum, a single axis with two poles’ (1978:25), with most photographic works occupying a space towards the centre of the axis. ‘The distance between [the two poles] is to be measured not in terms of the relative force or originality of their work, but in terms of their conceptions of what a photograph is: Is it a mirror, reflecting a portrait of the artist who made it, or a window, through which one might better know the world?’ (sic).

To this reader it seems diligent to consider the options of a best intended perspective offered by Szarkowski. By understanding our photographic posture,  spontaneous or calculated; introvert or extrover; subjective or objective, narrative or metaphorical, we can choose the most appropriate technique, determine our photographic lexicon and develop a syntax for images that will best communicate what we wish to say or show. 

Do we get into bed with the Edward Western (b.1886-1958), whose métier supposed that ‘the camera must be used for recording life’ (Weston, 1973:55), by objectively recording anatomical features?  The antithesis of a photographic struggle for an unadulterated, straight representation of truth in image form. Or do we alternately lean towards a figurative, phenomenological, abstracted representation of our subject? Can we become unfettered from literal interpretations, in a similar vein to the later work of American photographic explorer Alfred Stieglitz (b.1864-1946)? If this is possible then can our photographs function as an equivalent of our own experiences, thoughts and emotions? We can look to Stieglitz for an understanding of the difficulties in operating in this arena:

‘Man (looking at a Stieglitz Equivalent [see figure 16]): Is this a photograph of water?

Stieglitz: What difference does it make of what it is a photograph?

Man: But is it a photograph of water?

Stieglitz: I tell you it does not matter.

Man: Well, then, is it a picture of the sky?

Stieglitz: It happens to be a picture of the sky. But I cannot understand why that is of any importance.’ 

(Norman, 1984:9)

To show that my photographs were not due to subject matter, not to special trees, or faces, or interiors, to special privileges. Clouds were there for everyone, no tax as yet on them, free. So I began to work on the clouds, and it was great excitement, daily for weeks. Every time I developed I was so wrought up, always believing I had nearly gotten what I was after, but had failed. A most tantalizing sequence of days and weeks. I knew exactly what I was after. I had told Miss O’Keeffe I wanted a series of photographs which when seen by Ernest Bloch (the great composer) he would exclaim: Music! Music! Man, what is that music? How did you ever do that?’

(Stieglitz, 1923:255)

Critical theorist and Weimar era film critic Siegfried Kracauer (b.1889-1966) (2014:67) offers a polemic view to the Mirror/Window debate that contrasts Szarkowski’s spectral interpretation. By first rejecting the Proustian exploratory, indiscriminatory and emotionally disconnected view of photographic window which ‘froze and arrested time’ (Fritzsche, 1997:143) and then disassembling its counter point.

‘Actually there is no mirror at all. Any photograph is the outcome of selective activities which go far beyond those involved in the unconscious structuring of the visual raw material. The photographer selects deliberately both his subject and the manner of presenting it. He may prefer inanimate objects to portraits, outdoor scenes to interiors; and he is relatively free to vary and combine the different factors upon which the final appearance of his product depends. Lighting, camera angle, lens, filter, emulsion, and frame – all these are determined by his estimates, his esthetic judgment’ (Kracauer, 2014:68)

The window is shattered by individual contingent realities and the observation that the conscious mind which filters the mirror, prevents a vivid reflection of the true self in any photograph. What Kracauer leaves us with is what can be described as ‘a basic tension between, on the one hand, the approach he describes as photographic, which is comparable to an imaginative reader trying to discover the hidden layers of a text and, on the other hand, the approach of the traditional artist who, passionately wanting to express his vision, tries to realise it using photography’ (Despoix, 2014:19). So, are we using photography to understand the reality we inhabit or to make our vision of reality more inclusive? Akin to the self-limiting introvert/extrovert debate, there is likely a middle ground to be found here (Unless of course a photographic project is created and never shared), but there is likely to be one approach that takes precedent as a motivating factor for picture making. 

Kracauer’s ideas were in opposition to the prevailing inter-war thoughts on photography which promoted the medium ‘as being most transparent, offering direct access to the real’ (Berger, 2009:52). He formed a view that independence is an impossibility and the truth is unobtainable, we are all subject to fortuitous encounters (Kracauer, 2014:72) and ‘the zeitgeist’ which ‘conditions perception’ (sic:69). Our perception creates our reality and our perception, there is no real reality to be found in or out of our minds, we are trapped in a Kafkaesque loop, bound by the human susceptibility to experience error (Merleau-Ponty, 2002:5 & Pomerantz, 2014:509) and truth bias (Levine, 2014). In his review of Dagmar Barnouw’s book, Critical Realism: History, Photography and the Work of Siegfried Kracauer,  Peter Fritzsche (1997:144) collates a number of passages from the publication to explain why Kracauer believed that photography is not a route to truth: ‘“Historical reality resembles camera reality,” averred Kracauer in a letter to Leo Lowenthal . Neither the historian nor the photographer can hope to state “ultimate truths”; rather they reveal a “peculiar openness to the visible world” in ways that permit readers and viewers access to new and surprising aspects’.

We're Cyborgs

Like an orator without a tongue, a photographer without a camera is something of a misnomer. The deduction of the camera conveyed here renders the definition superfluous and the aspiring communicator mute and constant. A photographer’s recognition of being so, is therefore the result of a union between the corporeal and the mechanical, the evolving and the developing. 

The camera in the hands of a photographer extends their communicative abilities beyond normal human limitations, it acts when called upon, as an expressive auxiliary organ. We can perhaps call photographers Cyborgs, but only by stretching the definition past the cardiac patient with a pacemaker implant, towards a more metaphoric understanding of our close relationship with technology. American photographer Dorothea Lange understood this clearly nearly 80 years ago when she explained that ‘for better or worse, the destiny of the photographer is bound up with the destinies of a machine’ (Sayer, 2009:56).