Art & Perception

Brooks Jensen’s podcast of November 16th makes an interesting point about the way that different artists work.

The tenor of his thought is that photographers tend to be less likely to be artists in other fields as well – in comparison with painters or sculptors etc. He is not claiming an absolute line here (please listen to the podcast), but a tendency.

I think he probably has something.

The question is ‘why?’.

What I’m about to say is riddled with exceptions and iffs and buts. I’ll try to deal with the major ones as I go.

Photography is a dramatically different art process from any artform where you start off with a blank canvas, a white sheet, or an empty space.

As a photographer I don’t build an artwork piece by piece. I don’t need an idea. I can’t dramatically alter a work once it has begun.

No, as a photographer, I put myself in positions where there is something to see. I subtract the things that I don’t want to include and then I press the shutter. Once I have pressed the shutter, 95% of the work is done.

This doesn’t mean that I can’t have a project in mind, or that I can’t have some thoughts about what I am doing in advance. But I can’t influence what there is; I can’t control to any great degree what will pass in front of my camera. I decide where to stand and when to press the button. This may explain our collective fascination with street photography. Is this the form of photography where the photographer has least control over what is in front of the camera?

There are photographers who work out in advance a picture and then work to create it. I’ve recently seen an interview with a photographer who can take months of preparation before getting to the camera work, and, even when shooting, will go days without making an exposure. I think such photographers are the exception.

I think that photography is most like the additive arts when still life photographs are involved. There is no great difference, I think, between the thought processes behind creating a still life painting and creating a still life photograph. I also think that the ‘clean sheet’ art closest to photography is drawing from life (or possibly watercolour painting). The production time is short enough, and the possibilities of reworking are limited enough, that the same ‘see and react’ process could be happening. Photography has been called ‘instant drawing’.

Brooks Jensen also noted, as an exception to his general view, that a considerable number of photographers have been musicians. I think that this makes sense. Musicianship is also an art where the important bit is in the doing. Not the thinking beforehand, nor the artefact afterwards.

The idea that such a large part of the art of photography has happened when the shutter is pressed makes sense of the observation that photographers don’t often show unfinished work for comment. Showing an unfinished work makes much more sense for an additive artform because somebody can say something that may significantly, rather than marginally, influence the final piece.

It also begins to explain some of the miscommunication about communication. If to begin an artwork you have to have an idea, then you are probably likely to bind that idea, in your mind, into the finished product.

So, photographers aimlessly wander around and randomly press the shutter button not having any idea in advance what they are trying to achieve……

Lots of people before me have said that ‘photography is about deciding where to stand and when to release the shutter’, so there is no credit to me in inventing that phrase. But it is a powerful one. Deciding where to stand doesn’t just mean ‘up a bit, down a bit, left a bit, fire’. It also means deciding where in the world to go and when to do it. But once you have done that you have to accept what there is. You can’t invent snow that has melted, or bring out a sun that doesn’t shine. You don’t create by adding. You don’t use your imagination, you use your eyes.

Whereas, if you start with a blank sheet, you can examine your idea and ask ‘is this an oil on canvas idea, or a linocut idea’ (or any combination you care to mention).

This is a very good description of what photographers do, whilst this is an incomplete, but nonetheless interesting, take on the f8-and-be-there serendipity mindset. By the by, the ‘f8 and be there’ idea is another take on the whole craft question – but that is for another time.

There are artists who are signficant photographers but who also are known in other art fields. Wright Morris was a novelist (I can’t explain that combination); David Hockney was a painter who did photography for a while (that is a much more likely way around for it to happen); Henri Cartier Bresson was a photographer who also drew (I think the phrase ‘instant drawing’ was his). Any more?

This entry also posted in Photostream.

Walter Bartman was my art teacher in high school in 1984-86 in Bethesda, Maryland. Students of “Mr. Bartman” were ten times more likely to become Presidential Scholars in Visual Arts than students in other art classes in the United States. Although he retired from high school teaching in 2001, Walter Bartman continues to teach landscape painting in Maryland and in workshops across the U.S. and in Europe.

Artwork in this post is plein air painting by Walter Bartman [click images to enlarge]. This interview was edited for publication together with Leslie Holt
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I’ve never needed an artist’s statement professionally. Probably I never will – I have no ambition to do the sorts of things that require them. However, if I did need one, I know I would have great difficulty in getting away with my working statement: This is what I saw. Even if I stretch that out into longhand – these photographs are representations, to the best of my ability, of what I saw – I only get to fourteen words.

I’ve updated my photo home page.

I’m writing about this again now, because I was recently asked by Lisa Call to explain what I meant when I said “art isn’t about communication. I am trying to communicate nothing. This is just what I saw.” Specifically she said “Colin could you expand on these comments? It is what you saw – but you put it here for us to see and to react to. Isn’t that a form of communication?”.

Now, I’ve had enough debates about the communication thing to know that, er, some of you disagree with me (one part of the debate is archived here, and I wrote an article which is here). I’ve no particular desire to go over that ground again, because it seemed to me that it was a matter of belief, and beliefs are not challenged by arguments. What I want to try to do here is to answer Lisa’s question in practical terms.

It is a fair question. If I’m not communicating when I put one of my pictures on display, then what am I doing?

I need to invoke a level one cut-off. I am saying here is a photograph. I think that that is about as uninteresting as communication can get, and even if I didn’t say it, the photograph would sort of say it for me. Please ignore this level.

What am I doing?

My photo home page has contained the following statement for some time: “I’m showing them to help create a dialogue, and with the hope that they may raise a smile, create an understanding or just generally do some good, some how, some where.” There are two parts to this, which I’ll deal with in reverse order:

a) smiles, understandings, and good: this is the altruism motive. I go to places like this every day for enjoyment. You post. I post. We both smile. I don’t think that this needs further explanation.

b) creating a dialogue: this is the potentially confusing area. I want to hear what you think about my photos. Not whether you think that they are sharp enough or whether the sky is blue enough – there is a place for that, but web reproductions aren’t usually worth the effort. No, I want to hear about what they make you think. I do this for purely selfish reasons, because some of you, some times, think something that adds to my thoughts and allows me to see better in the future. This is actually at its most interesting when your reaction is very different from mine. When there is no obvious flow between me seeing and creating, and you reacting. You have my attention the most when you have seen something that I didn’t.

If Winogrand is right and photos are new facts then they are interesting special cases to practise seeing on. If I can’t see what you can see in the photograph then I have to ask myself why? And is it interesting? It is much more difficult to have the same conversation about the real world. It is too big and we might not be looking at the same thing. Observation changes reality’s cat. Time creates difficulty. Things change whilst they are being described. On the other hand, photos are dimensionally limited. They don’t react to being observed. They do not change signficantly during a viewing period. And my photos are something that I think that I’ve looked at. That I think that I understand. Show me a new way of looking at them and boy, am I interested. I’m learning.

There are a couple of subsidiary things going on. I’m one of those human being thingies, so like everybody else I get high on random praise. Getting a few ‘the best photo ever’ comments never did anybody any harm.

I also use my photos as gateways to communication. Here I am on Photostream and Art & Perception (dual posting) talking about stuff – both through the comments and by email – with dozens of people that I’ve never met (it is sometimes slightly spooky that the conversations are overheard by quite so many thousands of you, which is why my email address is so freely available). The communication is about art. Not the other way around.

This is a 450 pixel version. To see a 650px version or a 950px version, click on the links.

Web reproductions. Don’t you love them. The original is pigment on paper. The paper is a mild gloss and is faintly off white. This gives the lightest of warm tones to the print, which I haven’t tried to reproduce here. My preferred size for this image is about 12 inches (30cm) on 19 inch paper.

On the first day of class my freshman drawing teacher had us all go out and buy 9″ x 11″ hardbound sketchbooks. We were expected to carry them around with us over the course of the semester, and draw constantly. Now, thirty years later, I find that I have an encyclopedia set of these books filling a shelf in my studio. Keeping journals/sketchbooks has become an integral part of my art practice and my everyday life.  But the way I use them has changed.

               I think of a sketchbook as something you draw in, and a journal as something you write in. And though I’ve always used the same book for both, I see that mine have evolved over the years, from more sketchbook to more journal. In the early ones I did very involved drawings, sitting for hours doing studies from nature, or drawing people. These days the drawings in my journals tend to be notational, and if I do anything more finished it’s on single sheets of paper. 

              My journals function as sketchbooks, idea books, diaries and scrapbooks. I always have the current one with me, in the bookbag that I carry around, along with whatever I’m reading at the time. And over the years I’ve developed certain conventions for them. For example, I’ve gotten in the habit of starting each entry with the date, time and location, so it’s very easy for me now to look back through them and see when certain ideas initially occurred, or where I was when I was writing about something. I also, early on, started keeping a list on the back page of the journal of the books I read. I list the title, author, and the date I finished reading it, and if the book made a particularly strong impression on me I put a star next to it. So at this point I have a running list of pretty much every book I’ve read during my adult life, including re-reads, and a simple rating system that is useful when I want to go back and retrieve information, or recommend books to friends. When the journal is full I put a number on the spine and add it to the shelf, and I start a new one.

               These journals serve several functions for me. The most obvious is that they’re a place to store ideas so I don’t forget them. Putting them down on paper also forces me to clarify the ideas somewhat, at least enough to put them into words or a sketch, and it also relieves me of the burden of carrying them around in my head. Often seeing the idea on paper helps to spur variations. Sometimes these ideas are visual, sometimes verbal. Sometimes I’ll start with a quick drawing, spin out a verbal list of associations or connections, and then do more drawings. So the journal becomes a place to not only record ideas but also to develop them.

               The journals are not just for my art practice, but are part of my everyday life. I use them as diaries; to record my thoughts, concerns and activities. They are scrapbooks that contain newspaper clippings, postcards and concert tickets. I’ve been writing songs almost as long as I’ve been painting, and the journals contain endless lists of possible titles. It’s pretty obvious how a title can be a starting point for writing a song, but I’ve also had titles launch whole series of paintings. The old cliche about a picture being worth a thousand words also works in reverse –a word can evoke a thousand pictures. Sometimes the same title will result in both a song and a painting. I keep all of these possibilities pretty open-ended, and don’t try to figure them out right away.

               Keeping the journals has taught me a lot about my creative process. I see ideas appear, and then reappear months or even years later, but changed in some way. Like they’ve been percolating under the surface, accumulating resonance and layers of meaning without my awareness. I can read diary entries from years ago, see the things I was excited or worried about, and gain perspective on how they’ve played out in my life. And most of all, the journals are a library of ideas, some terrible and some pretty good, more ideas than I could ever execute in several lifetimes.  I’ve learned not to edit or judge the ideas when I get them, everything goes in, and later when I look back through I pick the ones that are most promising to pursue.

               When people visit my studio and see the journals lined up on my shelf, they say “Oh, you must be very disciplined. I’ve tried to keep journals before, but I always stop.” But the truth is that I’m not disciplined about it at all. Here’s the big secret, the way I’ve been able to keep these journals going all these years – I don’t write or draw in them every day. When you try to do something as a discipline, like a diet or a New Years resolution, it’s easy to start out very gung ho, then miss a day or two, and decide that you’ve failed and you might as well give up. In my case, sometimes I’m working in the journal several times a day, and other times weeks will go by without an entry. But I’ve always got it with me, so it’s there when I need it.

I’m sure many of you keep sketchbooks or journals of some kind. In what ways is your process similar to mine? How is yours different?

Hanneke van Oosterhout recently showed this painting in earlier states. She got valuable suggestions from Rex, David, Colin, Jon, and Jewel as to how to improve the picture. Rather than respond in words, she has responded by modifying the painting itself. The latest version is shown above [click image to enlarge].

Is the painting finished?