Water, again

MCV MCV

TAG / DATE
Single Post

< >
Post 243 of 399

2012, Sep 08
Water, again

Seeking out the visible, documenting it and presenting it through the medium can have meaning, but I derive no value from that. For example, isn’t it the case that if you research a certain subject you wish to photograph you will find that there are already tens of thousands of images related to that subject floating around? Confronted by this situation, I feel that even if I can create a slightly better photographic image, it will still feel like squirting a water pistol underwater.

Seung Woo Back, interviewed in “Seung Woo Back: Nobody Reads Pictures” ¹

The last quote I put up from this book ² received a number of comments which showed varying degrees of denial about the situation of making photographs in 2012. I am not asking everyone to stop pointing their lens-based image-creating devices at real-world phenomena. Do I even need to make that clear? To be really plain about it, this situation isn’t anything more than the air we are breathing, or, you know, the water in which we’re swimming. It’s depressing to think that this thought would be considered inflammatory when it’s so obvious.

We have talked around the concept of a goal, which I would venture to say goes beyond questions of representation, or aesthetics. This is why Back is skeptical about taking the “slightly better photographic image.” If that aesthetic effect also constitutes the entire goal of the work itself, the work is useless, i.e. it has no real effect, because this effect is immediately canceled out. John ³ brought up Tumblr, which I think that can show why this is true: just look at the volume of aesthetically pleasing images that a user like jesuisperdu ⁴ posts every day. Like Back, jesuisperdu also puts forth an argument against an aesthetically-motivated photography, because whatever single photograph you take, there’s a Russian teen who can take one that’s just about as good. The challenge for photographers is not to find a style but a goal.

http://www.strandbooks.com/product/seung-woo-back-nobody-reads-pictures

http://blog.mcvmcv.net/2012/09/06/the-sea-of-images/

http://kenshukan.net/john/archives/2012/09/07/on-photography-as-of-late/: John is thinking about these things too, from the perspective of a working photographer

http://jesuisperdu.tumblr.com/: Tumblr user who posts a frightening quantity of excellent images

Tags (3)

Interviews, Korea, Seung Woo Back

The consumer mass is interested in little more than aesthetics, tumblr is the perfect example of that. Back’s/the Kim’s target audience may well need to abandon direct representation (though I would hardly say it’s coming to an end in some circles), that is if they haven’t already done so. Though this isn’t a problem unique to photographers, all creative (and technological) industries are suffering in a similar manner. No one wants to reinvent the wheel, but at the same time most people cannot fathom what possibilities come next.

While I agree with the general direction of what’s being said I might not be so negative as the Kim’s. I imagine a world of only further conceptual work would be much worse than what we have now. Also I do agree that a goal is essential for work to develop beyond the aesthetic, or at least a large part of bull****ting/mysteriousness on the artists behalf.

Posted by Dirk / September 10, 2012 at 8:13 pm:

Again, a quote that I don’t understand the newsworthiness, enlightenment or discussion factor of. Let’s hope it is lost in translation.

If I am not mistaken within 20 years after birth of the medium (could have been 10, could have been 30), the entire spectrum of what can be photographed, had already been photographed. Note: that was over 100 years ago. What was the question again? Oh, yes, something that you photographed, had already been photographed? What’s this, Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day?

And someone is suggesting that the solution to that is a “goal”? Err, OK… Susan Sontag 2.0 masterclass time: Art is – having a goal; having a goal at expressing something”… again, I am lost what these deep questions are supposed to address.

Suppose according to some, I am in denial. Not that I’m aware of what, but if you say so…

Posted by matej / September 12, 2012 at 5:07 pm:

There is no inherent point or ultimate goal in anything on Earth, no objective truths or individual knowledge or purpose, the quest for those things is something invented and externally forced upon us. Meaning is there if you give it, it is not something separate from “you”.

Posted by Tsubasa / September 23, 2012 at 2:24 pm:

I agree with Kevin, who commented under the previous post. I suspect that most of you who disagree with Dan’s posts are looking at his argument from the point of view of the artist/photographer. As an aspiring photographer, I agree with John Sypal that the current situation shouldn’t stop me from making more photographs, or squirting a water pistol underwater, as the case may be. It’s a daunting thought, though. The article in the link below estimates something like six billion images are uploaded to Facebook every two months. It’s a Jorge Luis Borges kind of nightmare if there ever was one.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2061763/Artist-Erik-Kessels-places-1m-Flickr-images-single-room-Foam-gallery-Amsterdam.html#ixzz1ds7kc7JI

Ok, so not many photo critics and photo-viewers (an alternative to the word consumer, which I hate) are going to trawl Facebook for the next best thing in photography, but it does illustrate a point which some have too easily dismissed; the sheer volume of images is unlike anything in history. At the risk of putting words in Dan’s mouth, Dan seems to be arguing that the photo critic/scholar/viewer has an almost impossible task – to sort the music from the ever-rising cacophony.

I can’t help but think that these two posts has some connection to his posts on A.D Coleman and his paper on photo criticism and its non-sustainability. Between an impossible task of diving through an ever-growing sea of images and getting little financial support to do it, the photo critic seems to be in a pretty desperate situation. This seems to me where Dan’s concerns lie: not in the sheer amount of images out there, but how the amount impacts critics and viewers – and therefore photographers.

To those who would question the value of a photo critic – I started out wanting to be a fiction writer. During much of that time, especially in high school and university, I couldn’t see what the point of a critic was. In positively critiquing a novel, wasn’t a critic merely agreeing with the writer and publisher on its worth, and if negatively critiquing it, wasn’t he/she either proven wrong some years down the track or forgotten about, along with the work itself? It wasn’t until I learned that, through his criticism, T.S Eliot was instrumental in “rediscovering” the poet John Donne (whose poems I loved) that I knew I was wrong.

I, for one, would like to see this discussion continue, if only to see how photographers and critics and photo viewers could work towards some practical way of sorting the good from the average, thereby proving Kim & Kim wrong when they assert that photographers cannot rescue their photos from the sea of images.

-->