Notebooks have played important parts in my photography over the years, but the on that I’m thinking about now is perhaps Doris Lessing‘s finest book. I thought about it again a few weeks back when she was announced as the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for literature, and more particularly when the author of one of the photo blogs I occasionally read celebrated the award by bemoaning the fact it had yet again not gone to his favourite American author.
As it happens Mr Colberg, I’m quite a fan of Philip Roth too, but had I been on that committee, my choice would still have gone to Ms Lessing, who after all did publish one of the more significant novels of the twentieth century 45 years ago in 1962. Her award can hardly be said to be premature.
I’m not sure what her novel itself has to tell us about photography directly, although I think it gives some interesting insights into the theme of subjectivity and the place of the artist in society which are germane, as well as more importantly, being an interesting read. With the paperback edition at almost 600 pages you do however need a fairly large pocket to carry it with you on your travels – which is where I have the time to do most of my reading.
But the author’s preface, some 16 or so pages added in 1971, is more directly relevant, because it deals – as well as with this particular book – with the role of critics and criticism, and with the stultifying effect of our worldwide systems of education on both the enjoyment and production of literature. Unless you are Rip Van Winkle and have just awoken after rather more than his 20 years, you will know that photography too has undergone a revolution, or perhaps rather a takeover by the academics, curators and critics in a not dissimilar fashion.
As Lessing describes, children from an early age are taught to think of everything in terms of success, of failure and comparison, as if literature (or photography) was a horse-race. They are also taught to mistrust their own judgement, and rather to find and rely on the opinions of authorities. What is educated out of us is the ability to be imaginative, to enjoy and to trust our own experiences and to make our own judgements.
It is a preface worth reading (although I never like to read prefaces, or at least not until after I’ve read the book. when I am in a position where I can decide what I think of the preface.) It’s also a book worth reading, but for different reasons, starting most importantly with enjoyment.
As someone who tries to write about photographs and photography, I often ask myself what I am doing and why. But certainly it has to start with the pictures and with my experience and then my analysis of that experience rather than from some kind of theoretical higher ground.
And when I read much critical writing by others, I often wonder whether the writer has ever stopped and really looked at the photographs they think they are writing about, and certainly am often sure they have never let themselves really experience them.
In my talk in Bielsko-Biala last month, one of the many things in my performance that wasn’t in my script was reading a quotation from Lessing’s preface; partly because of its relevance to the developments in photography since the 1970s and to being a photographer, but also because what I was trying to do was to speak in a very personal manner, to share some of my own experiences and judgements about the work of other photographers as well as my own work. As I said there, unless your work is personal it isn’t worth doing, but if it is only personal it isn’t worth doing either.