Re-Awakening of Spring - Er, Fall

The signs of fall are unmistakeable.  Outside my bedroom window, the Japanese maple is chartreuse, on its way to gold, and the giant cherry tree is tinged with yellow and orange as a prelude to its flaming red glory; the mornings and evenings have turned cool and the days are pleasantly warmed by the slanting sun - and the 2014-2015 PEN/Faulkner Reading Series began last night!

While I have attended the readings for many years, this may have been the first time I went to the season kickoff, and I found myself more excited than usual.  I suddenly realized that for me it was like finally getting to a concert on time instead of arriving late.  And how fitting that the first reading featured four emerging writers hosted by an established name, nascent careers serving as a metaphor for a reading series at the beginning of a season, and vice versa.

Each of the writers read an excerpt of a story just published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, and Ann Beattie, the moderator, then asked each a question about their work.  It was an enjoyable evening, and it whet my appetite both for reading the rest of each story and for attending more of the reading series.

As I was starting to think about these things while walking back to the Metro after the reading, I was struck by the luminous quality of the quiet autumn night on Capitol Hill.  

The Hill takes on a different character at night, one not seen by camera-toting, t-shirt clad people spilling out of a caravan of buses.  The brick sidewalks in deep shadow and streetlight, the quiet streets of Victorian and Federal row houses, the dramatic spotlighting of churches and Government buildings, are all starkly on display when the only sound is one's footsteps.

It was also nice to not feel such a bifurcation between my writer self and my photographer self and to sense an easier fluidity between the two.  They may be different, but they're not oil and water.

 

Having picked up a copy of the VQR at the reception, I did read more of the writers' work before going to bed and again this morning, and I was impressed and inspired.  It was just the charge I needed to jump-start my own writing (starting with this piece) after taking several months off!  Part of this was re-engaging with the literary community and being reminded that even though writing itself is a solitary pursuit, telling stories is not - in fact, it's very much the opposite.

It was a night of great expectations - for these four talented writers, for the reading series ahead, and for my own development in this new year.  Thanks to PEN/Faulkner for doing so much to feed the literary community in D.C.!

What He Left Me

Down in the basement of the house where I grew up, on the floor of an old grey metal cabinet that stretched far above my head, were supplies that held silent mystery: flat yellow boxes of Kodak Ektachrome photosensitive paper and scary-looking bottles of developing fluid.  Sometimes I would pick them up and just wonder, excited about my dad's occasional mention of setting up a darkroom.

On another grey cabinet, this one large and squat, with shallow drawers for flat storage of blueprints, sat some kind of developer machine.  We never knew how it worked.

Somewhere in my dad's past, he had apparently developed his own photographs, though he never gave us the details.  That remained for us to imagine, especially when it became clear that the darkroom would never happen.

Dad, always the shutterbug!

We all knew he liked taking pictures.  He documented everything, from holiday dinners (every one of them), to how we looked before going off to church, to the trees in our backyard.  I thought it was kind of ridiculous - and that was during the days of film, when every frame counted and cost something.  Weren't all the poses the same, whether around the dining room table at Thanksgiving or in front of the house on a Sunday morning?  Didn't we always look the same?

After he died in 2004, we discovered that this passion went back to his years as a young adult.  We found boxes and boxes of photos going back to the 1960s, World War II, and even as far back as his early childhood - meaning he kept pictures belonging to his father, who died before WWII.  And in an old Army foot locker were hundreds more photos from his days as a young draftee in the China-Burma-India Theater - along with rolls of movie film.

Young Man, as subject

Too bad he wasn't as good at organizing and mounting pictures as he was at taking them.  Since they were all loose - in envelopes, boxes, or simply bound with a disintegrating rubber band - it's hard to know if he meant for them to be passed on or if it was all just part of his general tendency not to throw anything away.

Whatever the case, he showed me over the decades that it was important to capture moments of time that will never be repeated (even if they seem to recur, in a young boy's mind).  That there was value in documenting events, family get-togethers, the seasons.  That even the ordinary was worth photographing.  And this, I have come to realize, was his greatest gift to me, this way of seeing and valuing life, this sense of urgency to capture a fleeting moment.  

From the time I received my first camera as a child - a cube-shaped Brownie, which I still have - I've always loved taking pictures.  I finally realized recently that this passion was hard-wired in me, and I decided to stop suppressing a years-long drive to pursue photography beyond simple snapshots and see where it would take me as an art form.  In 2012 I jumped in with both feet, crossing over to the visual arts side at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and taking my first week-long photography workshop.  This summer I will be taking my second one, working with David Hilliard in an exploration of photography as storytelling.  (And in my own full-circle experience, we will be working synergistically with Pam Houston's fiction workshop, which I took three years ago at the Taos Summer Writers' Conference.)

When you're cool, you're always ready

As photography takes up more and more space in my head I feel grateful to my dad.  My friends get impatient with me for "taking 500 shots of the same thing" (that's a direct quote) the same way we would always groan when my dad wanted to take yet another picture of us around the dining room table as the food got cold.  He was on to something and passed a little more of it on to me each time he forgot to wind the camera first and we had to say "cheese" again.

Henri Cartier-Bresson couldn't have summed it up any better.  I've quoted him before in this blog and will likely do so again.  It is so much the reason my dad and I shared a drive to photograph:

Life is once, forever.

Is Photography Over?

Yesterday I read a post with the title above on the "Still Searching" blog, moderated by Fotomuseum Winterthur in Zurich, Switzerland, as an "Online Discourse on Photography."  The main question raised was: given the inexorably changing world of photography, with everyone becoming a photographer through the rapidly advancing technology of cell phone cameras and post-production editing, is photography as we know it "over"?

Go to any event, and all you see is a crowd of people holding up their phones, capturing the event.  Posting pictures to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram is now a way of life and has probably surpassed text as the substance most often sent into the world.  Indeed, the essay asks whether photography and seeing can now be considered the same.

And anyone can now access software to make perfect less-than-perfect pictures.  Every digital camera now offers a proprietary package of tools, and then there is Windows Photo Editor, iPhoto, Aperture, Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop.  One can get as technical as one wants and achieve eye-popping results.

Double Jack in the Pulpit, Robert Mapplethorpe

That isn't to say that everyone understands how to use these tools, though - or that technical software knowledge translates into artistry.  Just because you have the cropping tool on your computer doesn't mean you'll know where or how much to crop - that is to say, why you crop - to make it a better photograph.  (This is not to ignore the issue of having to crop in the first place; it is simply meant as a quick example of the difference between technique and art.)

The same can be said of writing.  Anyone can use alliteration to augment an image ("The snake slithered along the sand and seemed to sneer.") or shorten the length of sentences in an action scene to speed up the pace.  But writing well is so much more than well-chosen techniques to achieve effects.  You still have to stitch together scenes in the right order, formulate believable motivation, rachet up tension, pull the reader on board with the protagonist, tweak the pacing, and manipulate language to elicit emotion (and the right one, at the right time), as well as spin many other plates.  You need both craft and art to make a good story.  Craft can be taught.  Art has to come from within.  (One can develop a sense of vision, but that's a subject for another day.)

Napoli - 1960, Henri Cartier-Bresson

I learned in my first photography workshop that it's not the "seeing machine" you choose that determines the quality of your pictures.  I was shocked to find that my instructor, Joanne Dugan, didn't care what kind of camera we used for class.  She said we could even use a phone camera.  I had naîvely assumed that the "nicer" your camera, the better your pictures would be.  But it didn't take long to understand the main point of the class: that it's not the technology that is fundamental to your photographs; it's your vision, the way you see life around you.  Indeed, some of my favorite images are ones I've taken with my phone.  They're not the best technically, but I like what I captured in the scene - the mood, setting, and composition.

That's why I'm not worried that photography might be "over."  No matter how many people are using their iPhones to take pictures, most are still just taking snapshots and aren't interested in anything else.  No matter how much the price of Photoshop may drop (if it ever does), many are just going to play with it, albeit to varying degrees of sophistication.  Only certain people are going to struggle with capturing their vision of the world in a way that satisfies them.  Only the artist is going to spend the time and energy to bring an image in line with that vision, battling disappointment and frustration. 

Seven A.M., West Seventies, Cinda Berry

Everyone wants to get their pictures out for others to see, but only the artist wants something universal and not particular, to leave behind not documentation but testimony.  And what they create enriches us.

And there's certainly room for everyone here; this is not a race or a competition to see whose photographs should or will exist or be seen.  I like to say that I have been pursuing photography seriously for a little over a year - and relative to my own history, it's true.  But all it takes is one look at any photography website or the Flickr site of a photography Meetup group to be reminded that I am just another hack.  (A well-intentioned, serious hobbyist, but at this point, a hack nonetheless.)  I might fancy myself a neophyte artist - I don't even consider myself an evolving artist quite yet - but I am barely at Square One, and it doesn't take much for me to feel intimidated and overwhelmed.

But it does no harm to photography for people like me to try their best with their limited knowledge and skill to try and create memorable, unique images, whether we fancy ourselves as artists or not, because there will always be plenty of true artists who see the world differently from the rest of us and have different ways of interpreting it through

Provincetown Dusk, Mark Abe

their photographs.  They wrestle with technique and nuance and meaning in ways we have never considered.

They probably worried over this question at other times, too, like when the Polaroid camera first arrived or when the digital camera was born.  But the democratization of tools does not mean death of the art.  Can't it instead mean a potential increase in popular discussion, and isn't that good?  Photography that is passed off as art but which lacks heart will distill out.  And images that are generated by amateurs in a thoughtful, sincere effort to create art can hardly be a threat to it.  Even when produced by hacks like me.

So, is photography over?  

Not on your life.



Photo Credits: mapplethorpe.com, imgarcade.com, intaglioso.com, Mark Abe