Pretty is as Pretty Does: All of Aesthetics in One Swell Foop, Proving that Photos are Facts about the world, and whoever believes the opposite is a
Hey, I didn't get to finish my title--what's this?
I meant to say: "Whoever believes the opposite is a lunatic." Okay? Now I can get on to the important part of my blog: the blog itself. Titles are a bunch of crap anyway.
I take/make pictures with cameras. I got a degree in it from an art school, where I learned a lot that I now consider important, like the difference between lying and investing in your future, and when I get the chance I strike out and look at the world to see what I can see. Sometimes, it's a landscape, sometimes a cityscape, sometimes family members. Sometimes it's "serious" shooting, sometimes it's snapshots. I put the quotes around "serious" because who's to deny that a parent with a point-and-shoot digital camera isn't serious about capturing an infant's first stand-alone steps. I don't have to make a living with pictures, so I'm free to shoot whatever I want, and for whatever reason. Like Dick Cheney, who's also free to shoot at whatever he wants.
I've had to divest myself, though, of Biblical Commandment #11: a photograph that isn't gallery level excellent isn't worth shooting. I don't know where I picked this up, maybe from all the talk about archival prints, straight prints with no manipulation as the Supreme Ideal in photography, and the magic word: "vision."
Here's a definitive aesthetic proclamation: My vision is whatever I see. Duh, and Thank You.
This means I can do what Gary Winogrand said he did: take a picture to see what a scene looks like photographed. Or take a picture for the hell of it, even if no one would ever want to look at it in the future. Digital photography makes this much less expensive, but I often do the same with film. I'm amassing many negatives that will never be printed. Why? I'm not always sure I know. I don't print for shows (though at one time I felt compelled to get into shows--a career in art photography seemed important). Sometimes it just seems the thing to do. Considering how many image makers have made the ordinary and unprepossessing their subject matter, how can I go wrong? If anyone wants to contact me to purchase any number of my images, by all means contact me for a list of prices. I don't have (at this point) any list of images, or examples of images, because if you've seen one, you've seen them all. So, just send in your order, and I'll be glad to close my eyes and choose one for you. If you get enough of them, it will be like the patterns on the walls of mosques. (In my more etymological moments, I mull over the historical relationship between the edifice and the insect: "mosqueito." When I finish my definitive proclamations on aesthetics, I'll take up etymology.)
One of my daughters and I were in Yosemite recently, and I was clicking the shutter for all kinds of reasons: I saw some tree bark and remembered that Ansel Adams and Edward Weston shot tree bark; a waterfall looked cool; I wanted souvenir pictures of my daughter in front of impressive geological features--waterfalls, Half Dome, all of Yosemite Valley, Nevada and Vernal Falls. Photo Tip: when the falls are at a distance, as they are when you view them from Glacier Point, you hardly have to do any hiking at all to get pictures of both of them. I believe I may have taken two or three steps. I might even just have turned to my right or left, and Voila! A lady sat on the stone steps overlooking that immense landscape. She sat motionless for a long time. I considered calling 911, but then I saw her take out a pair of binoculars and gaze. I believe she was gazing rather than gaping. I was gaping. When my mother looked earnestly at me, I thought of her as my gaping Maw. But this woman continued with this activity for some time. Then she put her binoculars away, picked up a walking stick, and changed locale. There, she gazed again. I was filled with a rush of human feeling.
Another Photo Tip: The spiritual value of a strenuous hike. After much consternation, we found the trail head to Inspiration Point, where we thought we should go for a drink of some inspiration. It turned out to be right across the street from the Tunnel Outlook, where every visitor entering Yosemite Valley from Fresno is required by law to stop and gape. We had gaped long and hard. I have a picture of the Yosemite Tour Bus to prove I was there.
But the real point is this: Inspiration Point was the shortest of several hikes listed on the trailhead sign. 1.3 miles (one way, I think). I looked for a menu for the snack bar that would surely be at the end of the trail, but couldn't find it and considered that just one more thing to beef with the rangers about--those clucks. They never want you to have any fun.
Let's Go! I yelled "Geronimo!", and then I thought better and yelled "On y va!" instead, after my favorite comic book characters, Asterisk and Obelisk, two late-Roman Empire Gallic warriors who fought courageously against the Roman occupation. We started determinedly up a 45 degree incline. It was 4:30 in the afternoon. My day was just getting started.
My daughter said, "Are you sure this is necessary? I thought we were taking a walk. When does it level off?" I said, "Soon, I'm sure. But to make sure, I'll check ahead."
I hiked forward, my jaw jutting, legs pumping, fist clenched, for about twenty yards. When she was out of sight, I dropped all pretenses. I peered hard as far as I could see. If eyes can pump iron, that's what mine were doing.
I'm told that "rose" by any other name is the same, so it doesn't matter whether I say the trail inclined, heightened, elevated, angled upward, or eventually met my eyes at their own level. It was up, up, up as far as the eye(s) could see, off into the trees, the forest primeval, where piney monuments to time lay about, a bunch of dead trunks on the ground, or, alternately, blasphemed into the air like pirates in a pew looking to the crucifixion for provocative ideas about how to entertain their next hostage.
My daughter was not amused. I, sensitive parent that I am, even at a considerable distance, sensed her frustration and offered her an out: "We could stay here, and say we took a hike." Actually, I sensed nothing. I wanted an out and pretended to let her off the hook. She, hearing me pant from 50 yards away, agreed that Inspiration starts at home, so I made the round trip back to the trailhead in record time, and we decided to move on.
"But not before we document our achievement," I said. "Stand by that sign. I'll take your picture, which will be worth a thousand words, and we'll use it to prove that we hiked--let's see, what's the longest hike here?" I checked the sign--"Hm, Tijuana--yes, we hiked the John Muir Trail from Yosemite to Tijuana, and back, in one day, and had time for lunch at some dingy place (what else is there in Tijuana?). We arrived back at the Trailhead, nearly dead for thirst, our clothes ragged (if you don't look too hard at the photograph, this is defensible--I'll only mention to the inner circle of my blog readers that Jessie seems to have just showered) and tattered, nearly falling off us, and struggled, gasping to the car.
"Dad, Mexico's not on the John Muir Trail, and there's no hike to Tijuana listed on this sign."
"If I just adjust the focus, no one will be able to tell where these hikes go, or how long they are." I gave the focus knob my best English and rubbed my thumb on the lens as an extra precaution. "I'll print it in with Photo Shop. Don't stand too close to the sign, no one will recognize you. In fact, get way back there--that way it will seem like you're just coming around through those trees--hey, cool, like Shakespeare--enter, chased by a bear! Not only will this picture document a monumental achievement, it will have literary value! Better yet, get up here, right in front of the camera, then it will seem like more candid, you know, like I documented you struggling to the car. Good--got it! Here, another one--struggle a little more. Hunch your shoulder like you fell down a cliff or something, or into a deep ravine. Good, yes--here, throw some dirt on your face. It was a terrible fall, and we got it all on film, symbolically anyway." I emptied a bottle of Perrier on her in case we needed to say we had had to cross a raging river. I love how the camera never lies.
I've developed a knack for close and sustained argument. It's easier than spitting.
My conclusion from all this is that, even if you're an art photographer, and even if you have a confused idea of what that means--as I do--you can take a picture of anything you want. And you can enjoy a pretty sunset, or pretty waves at the beach, or a pretty member of either gender in a costume that shows off the particular virtues of that gender, whichever it might be.
This reminds me: I told some friends recently that my wife and I were going to Switzerland. One asked, "Which of you is getting the sex change?" We had only planned to be gone for six days, but it's not too late to extend our stay.
One final remark on the aesthetics issue, though I think I must pretty well have exhausted the subject and anyone reading about it. At Olmsted Point, I hopped about here and there with my camera, snapping this and snapping that, and then looking at the the screen to see just what I'd snapped and whether I should snap it again, or go snap something else. Snap snap snap. I noticed a fellow sitting with his legs in a perfect lotus position, his eyes closed, face into the full mid-afternoon sun, a touch of sunscreen on his nose. In spite of his eyelids being on fire, he was perfectly at peace with the cosmos, but he radiated unmistakable hostility toward me. I snapped him. Sitting still with an unearthly stillness (I know passive aggression when I snap it), he seemed to say, "Can't you commune with the grandeur before you without that infernal snapping? Do you think everything can be reduced to a 4x6? An 8x10? An 11x14? A 16x20? Etc.?" He virtually snapped at me, "You cheapen everything you snap. Nature is glorious. The scene before us is f-ing ineffable. What kind of camera is that anyway--how many megapixels? I f-ing can't count that high." Ha-ha, I silently laughed his scornful silence to scorn. Couldn't even count. I practice that all the time: watch--one, two, three, four, etc. A friend of mine once wrongly said, "When we see a landscape, we take a picture in order to control the magnificence in front of us." I made up the quote on his behalf, to represent the essence of his idea, and I haven't seen him for a long time: his name, in case he ever stumbles onto this blog and joins me on the trial by trail, is Dave Jacobs. Hi Dave! He became a dean of something somewhere, but he was really smart and a good photographer. But he was still wrong about controlling landscapes by photographing them. I snap the scape 'cause it f-ing awes me, and I want to get a little of that awe back in my house when I have to leave the awesome reality and that lotus-guy, and the lady with her binoculars, and the crowded "comfort stations" behind. And I want to prove that I went on this fabulous hike. So Dave, wherever you are, whatever you're doing, deaning, or maybe you're the president of something by now--you deserve it, you're smart--but control is not the issue. Okay? I love blogging--Dave will never see this, and so I never have to defend my ideas. Swift had a metaphor for this kind of writing: it's like the spider constantly spinning a web out of himself. Ew. Forget Swift.
This kind of writing is like a photograph--it proves the world is there, but you wonder what the world there is.
And that's the latest report on the most definitive approach to aesthetics, all in one swell foop. Except I forgot to mention Ralph Gibson. He got famous for some surrealist images that were pretty mysterious and impressive. He must have been intuitively good. I heard him talk about aesthetics once, and he thought he was really dazzling his audience with a bunch of blather about "style" and "content." How did he know that a picture consisted of those elements? The owner of his gallery in New York told him so. Right on, Ralph! That was one swell foop right there.
Seriously, though, folks, take any picture you want (pedophilia excepted). I've noticed that in the grand scheme of things, aesthetic theories are rather weak on the endurance scale, but works of art are still there hundreds of years later. Especially if they're archival.
I meant to say: "Whoever believes the opposite is a lunatic." Okay? Now I can get on to the important part of my blog: the blog itself. Titles are a bunch of crap anyway.
I take/make pictures with cameras. I got a degree in it from an art school, where I learned a lot that I now consider important, like the difference between lying and investing in your future, and when I get the chance I strike out and look at the world to see what I can see. Sometimes, it's a landscape, sometimes a cityscape, sometimes family members. Sometimes it's "serious" shooting, sometimes it's snapshots. I put the quotes around "serious" because who's to deny that a parent with a point-and-shoot digital camera isn't serious about capturing an infant's first stand-alone steps. I don't have to make a living with pictures, so I'm free to shoot whatever I want, and for whatever reason. Like Dick Cheney, who's also free to shoot at whatever he wants.
I've had to divest myself, though, of Biblical Commandment #11: a photograph that isn't gallery level excellent isn't worth shooting. I don't know where I picked this up, maybe from all the talk about archival prints, straight prints with no manipulation as the Supreme Ideal in photography, and the magic word: "vision."
Here's a definitive aesthetic proclamation: My vision is whatever I see. Duh, and Thank You.
This means I can do what Gary Winogrand said he did: take a picture to see what a scene looks like photographed. Or take a picture for the hell of it, even if no one would ever want to look at it in the future. Digital photography makes this much less expensive, but I often do the same with film. I'm amassing many negatives that will never be printed. Why? I'm not always sure I know. I don't print for shows (though at one time I felt compelled to get into shows--a career in art photography seemed important). Sometimes it just seems the thing to do. Considering how many image makers have made the ordinary and unprepossessing their subject matter, how can I go wrong? If anyone wants to contact me to purchase any number of my images, by all means contact me for a list of prices. I don't have (at this point) any list of images, or examples of images, because if you've seen one, you've seen them all. So, just send in your order, and I'll be glad to close my eyes and choose one for you. If you get enough of them, it will be like the patterns on the walls of mosques. (In my more etymological moments, I mull over the historical relationship between the edifice and the insect: "mosqueito." When I finish my definitive proclamations on aesthetics, I'll take up etymology.)
One of my daughters and I were in Yosemite recently, and I was clicking the shutter for all kinds of reasons: I saw some tree bark and remembered that Ansel Adams and Edward Weston shot tree bark; a waterfall looked cool; I wanted souvenir pictures of my daughter in front of impressive geological features--waterfalls, Half Dome, all of Yosemite Valley, Nevada and Vernal Falls. Photo Tip: when the falls are at a distance, as they are when you view them from Glacier Point, you hardly have to do any hiking at all to get pictures of both of them. I believe I may have taken two or three steps. I might even just have turned to my right or left, and Voila! A lady sat on the stone steps overlooking that immense landscape. She sat motionless for a long time. I considered calling 911, but then I saw her take out a pair of binoculars and gaze. I believe she was gazing rather than gaping. I was gaping. When my mother looked earnestly at me, I thought of her as my gaping Maw. But this woman continued with this activity for some time. Then she put her binoculars away, picked up a walking stick, and changed locale. There, she gazed again. I was filled with a rush of human feeling.
Another Photo Tip: The spiritual value of a strenuous hike. After much consternation, we found the trail head to Inspiration Point, where we thought we should go for a drink of some inspiration. It turned out to be right across the street from the Tunnel Outlook, where every visitor entering Yosemite Valley from Fresno is required by law to stop and gape. We had gaped long and hard. I have a picture of the Yosemite Tour Bus to prove I was there.
But the real point is this: Inspiration Point was the shortest of several hikes listed on the trailhead sign. 1.3 miles (one way, I think). I looked for a menu for the snack bar that would surely be at the end of the trail, but couldn't find it and considered that just one more thing to beef with the rangers about--those clucks. They never want you to have any fun.
Let's Go! I yelled "Geronimo!", and then I thought better and yelled "On y va!" instead, after my favorite comic book characters, Asterisk and Obelisk, two late-Roman Empire Gallic warriors who fought courageously against the Roman occupation. We started determinedly up a 45 degree incline. It was 4:30 in the afternoon. My day was just getting started.
My daughter said, "Are you sure this is necessary? I thought we were taking a walk. When does it level off?" I said, "Soon, I'm sure. But to make sure, I'll check ahead."
I hiked forward, my jaw jutting, legs pumping, fist clenched, for about twenty yards. When she was out of sight, I dropped all pretenses. I peered hard as far as I could see. If eyes can pump iron, that's what mine were doing.
I'm told that "rose" by any other name is the same, so it doesn't matter whether I say the trail inclined, heightened, elevated, angled upward, or eventually met my eyes at their own level. It was up, up, up as far as the eye(s) could see, off into the trees, the forest primeval, where piney monuments to time lay about, a bunch of dead trunks on the ground, or, alternately, blasphemed into the air like pirates in a pew looking to the crucifixion for provocative ideas about how to entertain their next hostage.
My daughter was not amused. I, sensitive parent that I am, even at a considerable distance, sensed her frustration and offered her an out: "We could stay here, and say we took a hike." Actually, I sensed nothing. I wanted an out and pretended to let her off the hook. She, hearing me pant from 50 yards away, agreed that Inspiration starts at home, so I made the round trip back to the trailhead in record time, and we decided to move on.
"But not before we document our achievement," I said. "Stand by that sign. I'll take your picture, which will be worth a thousand words, and we'll use it to prove that we hiked--let's see, what's the longest hike here?" I checked the sign--"Hm, Tijuana--yes, we hiked the John Muir Trail from Yosemite to Tijuana, and back, in one day, and had time for lunch at some dingy place (what else is there in Tijuana?). We arrived back at the Trailhead, nearly dead for thirst, our clothes ragged (if you don't look too hard at the photograph, this is defensible--I'll only mention to the inner circle of my blog readers that Jessie seems to have just showered) and tattered, nearly falling off us, and struggled, gasping to the car.
"Dad, Mexico's not on the John Muir Trail, and there's no hike to Tijuana listed on this sign."
"If I just adjust the focus, no one will be able to tell where these hikes go, or how long they are." I gave the focus knob my best English and rubbed my thumb on the lens as an extra precaution. "I'll print it in with Photo Shop. Don't stand too close to the sign, no one will recognize you. In fact, get way back there--that way it will seem like you're just coming around through those trees--hey, cool, like Shakespeare--enter, chased by a bear! Not only will this picture document a monumental achievement, it will have literary value! Better yet, get up here, right in front of the camera, then it will seem like more candid, you know, like I documented you struggling to the car. Good--got it! Here, another one--struggle a little more. Hunch your shoulder like you fell down a cliff or something, or into a deep ravine. Good, yes--here, throw some dirt on your face. It was a terrible fall, and we got it all on film, symbolically anyway." I emptied a bottle of Perrier on her in case we needed to say we had had to cross a raging river. I love how the camera never lies.
I've developed a knack for close and sustained argument. It's easier than spitting.
My conclusion from all this is that, even if you're an art photographer, and even if you have a confused idea of what that means--as I do--you can take a picture of anything you want. And you can enjoy a pretty sunset, or pretty waves at the beach, or a pretty member of either gender in a costume that shows off the particular virtues of that gender, whichever it might be.
This reminds me: I told some friends recently that my wife and I were going to Switzerland. One asked, "Which of you is getting the sex change?" We had only planned to be gone for six days, but it's not too late to extend our stay.
One final remark on the aesthetics issue, though I think I must pretty well have exhausted the subject and anyone reading about it. At Olmsted Point, I hopped about here and there with my camera, snapping this and snapping that, and then looking at the the screen to see just what I'd snapped and whether I should snap it again, or go snap something else. Snap snap snap. I noticed a fellow sitting with his legs in a perfect lotus position, his eyes closed, face into the full mid-afternoon sun, a touch of sunscreen on his nose. In spite of his eyelids being on fire, he was perfectly at peace with the cosmos, but he radiated unmistakable hostility toward me. I snapped him. Sitting still with an unearthly stillness (I know passive aggression when I snap it), he seemed to say, "Can't you commune with the grandeur before you without that infernal snapping? Do you think everything can be reduced to a 4x6? An 8x10? An 11x14? A 16x20? Etc.?" He virtually snapped at me, "You cheapen everything you snap. Nature is glorious. The scene before us is f-ing ineffable. What kind of camera is that anyway--how many megapixels? I f-ing can't count that high." Ha-ha, I silently laughed his scornful silence to scorn. Couldn't even count. I practice that all the time: watch--one, two, three, four, etc. A friend of mine once wrongly said, "When we see a landscape, we take a picture in order to control the magnificence in front of us." I made up the quote on his behalf, to represent the essence of his idea, and I haven't seen him for a long time: his name, in case he ever stumbles onto this blog and joins me on the trial by trail, is Dave Jacobs. Hi Dave! He became a dean of something somewhere, but he was really smart and a good photographer. But he was still wrong about controlling landscapes by photographing them. I snap the scape 'cause it f-ing awes me, and I want to get a little of that awe back in my house when I have to leave the awesome reality and that lotus-guy, and the lady with her binoculars, and the crowded "comfort stations" behind. And I want to prove that I went on this fabulous hike. So Dave, wherever you are, whatever you're doing, deaning, or maybe you're the president of something by now--you deserve it, you're smart--but control is not the issue. Okay? I love blogging--Dave will never see this, and so I never have to defend my ideas. Swift had a metaphor for this kind of writing: it's like the spider constantly spinning a web out of himself. Ew. Forget Swift.
This kind of writing is like a photograph--it proves the world is there, but you wonder what the world there is.
And that's the latest report on the most definitive approach to aesthetics, all in one swell foop. Except I forgot to mention Ralph Gibson. He got famous for some surrealist images that were pretty mysterious and impressive. He must have been intuitively good. I heard him talk about aesthetics once, and he thought he was really dazzling his audience with a bunch of blather about "style" and "content." How did he know that a picture consisted of those elements? The owner of his gallery in New York told him so. Right on, Ralph! That was one swell foop right there.
Seriously, though, folks, take any picture you want (pedophilia excepted). I've noticed that in the grand scheme of things, aesthetic theories are rather weak on the endurance scale, but works of art are still there hundreds of years later. Especially if they're archival.
posted by Vibistry at 11:48 PM
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