‘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’.