Dwelling on Images
Short books are saving my life right now. I look forward to the day when I can pick up a long novel or in depth study on some aspect of art history, but my motto these days is: do what you can. There’s a series of books on ekphrasis by David Zwirner books and the one I’ve been mulling over is titled, Photography and Belief by David Levi Strauss.
From the publisher:
“In this exploration of contemporary photography, David Levi Strauss questions the concept that “seeing is believing.”
Identifying a recent shift in the dominance of photography, Strauss looks at the power of the medium in the age of Photoshop, smartphones, and the internet, asking important questions about how we look and what we trust.
In the first ekphrasis title on photography, Strauss challenges the aura of believability and highlights the potential dangers around this status. He examines how images produced on cameras gradually gained an inordinate power to influence public opinion, prompt action, comfort and assuage, and direct or even create desire. How and why do we believe technical images the way we do?”
One of the big subjects in photography and for anyone interested in digital images, in social media, and in the fake and the real, right now, has to be about how images operate on us, through us, and what it means to believe in pictures. I’m coming at this a couple of ways in my novel which will be published next fall and in a book of essays I’m writing (in a bit of a stalled sort of way) currently about still life. Normally I might try and talk this through a bit more in this space, but I’m learning that I should probably keep some of my mulling to myself of late.
An interesting point made in the book though is that
“Images that appear on the screens of our devices go by in a streaming flow. Individual images are seldom apprehended separately, as a singular trace. Singular, still images operate very differently on the mind. The images consumed in a flow are seldom dwelled on, so their individual effect is limited, creating instead a disproportionately generalized effect. Just as the effect of words and images working together has been. It can further be argued that this flow of images has a less concentrated, singular effect than previous practices that involved discrete images being viewed repeatedly over time.”
Most of the images I take and post online are ones that are really meant for just that. I’m not a fine art photographer, in general. I don’t envisage most of my photographs on paper, blown up beyond the dimensions of a phone screen. I do imagine them on a larger computer screen with decent resolution and clarity from time to time, but that’s usually the extent of my fantasies. Does this change how we take photos? Sometimes when I click the shutter, I’m already thinking of how I can do this or that in Adobe Lightroom. I’m wondering if this would go over well on my Instagram. I’m wondering if the image I produce could disrupt the flow.
What happens if we just sit with a photo and contemplate it from outside the image flow of the internet? We know, probably, that this is how paintings need to be looked at, though obviously a painting is a very different sort of object.
I do from time to time post images for sale on Society 6, but TBH I don’t even really expect to sell them. (That said, thank you if you have purchased one of them!)
Images hold different sorts of truths. There are the brutal and gut wrenching truths that, say, an image of war or tragedy has. But every image has a sort of truth or falsity about it. For a long time I was interested in art forgery, and as you may know I wrote a novel about it that no one wanted to publish, so I published it myself. Anyway, there is the story of the art historian / fake buster who would just live with a work of art for a while and eventually it would either feel true, or it would feel off-kilter. The fake art always had something that felt odd about it after a while.
It seems to me that it helps to look long at a thing or an image. I guess in doing so we discover whether something is good, true, worthy of our attention in a sustained way. This is even true of art we make ourselves. Sometimes it’s immediately evident when I come back from a shoot — which is the best photo of the lot. Sometimes I have to look for a few days to pick out the best ones. Depends how tired my eyes are, how tired my soul. What other distractions are around. But I like the practice, of whittling down, figuring out which ones work the best, which ones say the most, feel the most. I’m not saying I’m any great photographer, but I like the process and the practice and what it teaches me about seeing, and yes, feeling.
How to make something true? How to slow down that endless flow that we find ourselves participating in, the big scroll….? I keep returning to the line by C.D. Wright on trees, when she says, “The trees true me.” What is it that trues me? What trues you? How to make things that ring true as trees? It’s sometimes disheartening to see some things/works get attention that don’t seem to warrant it. But in the end, whatever has depth is going to eventually reveal itself, persist, recur. (Naive thought perhaps).
I’ve returned to Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life lately. She says,
“It makes more sense to write one big book — a novel or nonfiction narrative — than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn. A project that takes five years will accumulate those years’ inventions and richnesses. Much of those years’ reading will feed the work. Further, writing sentences is difficult whatever their subject. It is no less difficult to write senstences in a recipe than sentences in Moby-Dick. So you might as well write Moby-Dick.”
And I agree with much of this — just not that your five year project need be a novel or NF narrative. Why couldn’t you pour you heart into five years worth of essays? Or a photo project? Or a photo/essay project? (Which is sort of what I’m up to TBH). But yes, why not be ambitious? Why not devote yourself?
Anyway, I’ve rambled. As one does on blogs.
I will end with a line that I think about a lot:
“If I could make one true, quiet photograph, I would much prefer it to having a lot of answers.”
– Consuelo Kanaga
