The Americans – Robert Frank

For the last year or two Jack Kerouac’s writings, philosophy, now the On The Road movie, and have been intertwined into my wikipedia late night surfing addiction. After a road trip across the country I read On the Road, and then The Dharma Bums - [good reads]. I watched his biography, and then after a little more research I found the work his friends at the same time, photos, writings etc that all depicts the same 1950s intrepid american history.

One thing lead to the next and through a little history of photography self-study this winter I came across Robert Frank’s work, which I first found online, and then amazon’s single click checkout later his book ended up in my mailbox.

Jack Kerouac opens the introduction to The Americans which is a collection of photos by Robert Frank

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“After seeing these pictures you end up finally not knowing any more whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin. That’s because he’s always taking pictures of jukeboxes and coffins – and intermediary mysteries.”

The photographs are haunting, and honest, and the lack of colour and the romanticism of time itself make them all that more appealing.

The combination essay, and anthology of photos is what I liked most of this book. A set context and interpretation by someone else – closer in time and place to the photos themselves, to echo or question your own interpretation of them.

These are a collection of my favourite photographs:

I also enjoy really like the sequencing of the next five shots. In putting all of my own travel work together into something cohesive I’ve been picking up on these subtleties I might have missed before.

 I like The Americans because it covers though not all Americans by any means but a sampling enough to get a feel. It is an ethnography in a sense – a comment on culture, of a time period. The captions give enough context without ruining the air of silent mystery from the photos, and of course I enjoyed nomadic nature of the photos themselves.

“To Robert Frank I give this message: You’ve got eyes.” – Jack Kerouac

[ The Americans On Amazon]

“Your eyes may be in good condition but do you know it?” - You Are Here: Thich Nhat Hanh

[March 2012 routine eye test of my own eyes getting ready for the summer, paid an extra $5 for the eye doctor to email me these]

To be followed by:

[Canon 5D 85mm f1.8]

“Photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical.”

-Susan Sontag

I wonder what it would be like to be a formal student of photography. I’ve become enthralled informally. I sit at my laptop ordering the next stack of books from amazon, all loosely to do with photography. Learning about the world, feminism, foreign countries, culture, history, politics, in context of the lens. I don’t think being a formal student could possibly be as fun.

My amazon surfing addiction led me to Susan Sontag a week or so ago and I finished her collection of essays On Photography not long after. Since then mostly for fun I’ve been re-reading, highlighting some her ideas. I’ve been thinking about the philosophy behind photography, photography culture, and the culture of photography. What I photograph, how I photograph, and what is happening to the photographs as they find their way out into the world via the internet, or in print. Photographs up for interpretation, must like the essays themselves.

“To collect photographs is to collect the world”

-Susan Sontag

Yet a photograph is only a small piece of the world. 1/1000th of a second of a reality that is given distance to in time and in physical space at the moment the shutter is released. A photograph does not explain, only acknowledge, and that is claimed by Sontag as both the tragic flaw, and what constitutes the attraction to the still image.

“only which narrates can be understood. The limit of photographic knowledge of the world is that, while it can goad conscience, it can finally never be ethical or political knowledge. The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist. It will be knowledge at bargain prices – a semblance of knowledge, a semblance of wisdom… the very muteness of what is.”
-Susan Sontag, On Photography.

The nature of the image is ingrained within society, as well as photography as a social rite; family photos, wedding photography, touristic snapshots, across the world are documented. My job, my work, relies on this knowledge. Taking a photograph can create an event, though it is not necessary to an event itself, it produces a second experience, the view and interpretation of the event. The experience, and the image of the experience. The latter a silent description, and therefore, inherent to the nature of photography, incomplete.

Susan Sontag finally speaks to beauty versus truth, and beauty as truth as the ultimate motivator to the making of a photograph. She talks about realism and the forged realism of photography in recent decades.  How a photo is interpreted as truth, and how photographic seeing is the ability to find beauty within the ordinary, or mundane, or in connections, beauty in relation to other things. This circles back to the camera’s ability, or photographic vision to transform reality into something beautiful, which then consequently weakens a photos ability to tell the truth. If we infer not everything can be beautiful.

“Beau c’est le vrai.”

Millet

On Photography challenged a lot of my ideas and my own philosophy and approach to photography. It made be question how I photograph; the precise act of knowing vs the intuitive encounter, (Sontag, 116) and why; a moralized idea of truth telling. (Sontag, 86) It made me entertain ideas that are glossed over in the world of wedding photography; ethics, beauty, the invitation to sentimentality, as well as the instant romanticism of the digital age and how that relates to my own documentary and personal work.

Sontag writes a clear picture of the photographs role in our society from the pre digital era, and still her ideas spark discussion and understanding today. As photographers and as the photographed we live in the age of the image.

March for me has been a month of inspiration, of a little more downtime than usual, and a struggle against the last bit of winter. I’ve been shooting a lot of work over the last month, involved with a project about women, and feminism, some personal family stuff, and then just average life, starting a new project and finishing up some wedding work and what not but mostly one thing has led to the next, as life does, and I feel the urge to tell you all about the new book series on the blog.

Okay.

So I read this excellent blog called Explore which is a smaller/shorter version of Brain Pickings (which is also excellent). And this iconic image of Inez Miholland on a white horse marching for Women’s votes in the US, showed itself in the feed I read pretty much every morning I don’t need to be somewhere early. I thought the photo was striking, and decided to open trusty wikipedia and do a little more research.

This article led me to this article  which led me to a movie called Iron Jawed Angels which led me take some pictures, which led me to this book which sparked my interest in Annie Lebowitz, and then after watching a documentary on her and her work, I heard of Robert Frank looked at his work. Went back to Susan Sontag and read her book On Photography read some Henri Cartier-Bresson, travelled into Toronto to see a lecture by Katharine Candow a journalist with a love for Vietnam speak in Toronto at National Geographic Live. And it has gone on for a month; self study, photography obsession, a serious slow down due to -20 temperatures in wedding season.

And then over coffee one morning, and a new set of books from amazon on my bed I had an idea. What if I summerized and shared my favourite parts of these books, these ideas, the documentaries on my blog. Collect them in an online library, well that will be something I don’t tell a lot of people in real life about, but online it would discuss things we don’t always talk about as wedding photographers, or travel photographers, or any photographers, things that the underly the reason we are motivated to create photos in the beginning. It would save my best friends the agony of my rambles on photography philosophy and maybe someone on this big wide internet thing will find it interesting.

So along with photo prose, I’d like to introduce a new bi-weekly blog series – the first of many coming tomorrow: