Less than 95 theses: In June 2005 I was in Poland for the first FotoArtFestival in Bielsko-Biala where I had been invited to show my work and also to give a couple of talks. While I was there I photographed Poland’s only statue of Martin Luther, and this inspired me to write my ‘Less than 95 theses‘ on photography with which I began one of my talks.
The pictures here all come from my few days in Bielsko-Biala and will include some of the other photographers who were there. You can read a little more about the festival in the previous post – and in online my FotoArtFestival Diary from 2005.
Madames et Messieurs
English owes its prominence not only to US (and earlier UK) global economic and political domination, but to its flexibility and adaptability, which we systematically abuse.
Translation is a valiant attempt at the often impossible. Language operates at various sublevels of denotation and connotation, through allusion. It depends on shared experiences and understandings that are often very different.
Fortunately, communication happens, and it often happens most strongly across the crevasses between our languages as we struggle for understanding. We understand not from the smooth inter-meshing of gears than transmits the everyday niceties, but from the strands that stick in our teeth or the grit that lodges and may grow into a pearl. Or simply give us sore feet.
Yesterday I met an Angel
Yesterday I met an angel. Two angels to be precise, not on the head of a pin, but in Bielsko. Around 8 foot tall, dressed in white and the regulation pair of wings each, and she gave me a photograph and a feathered flower.
But Bielsko is the city of angels, because I met another one on Thursday evening. Inez, I appreciate from the depths of my heart all you have done for the festival. To borrow the words of one of my great musical heroes, “We love you madly.“
[I think the official Polish translation for that last paragraph was something like ‘Peter thanks Inez for all her work on the festival.”]
This Morning, Luther
This morning I went in search of Poland’s only statue of Martin Luther, in a small clump of trees in Plac Lutra.
This address begins for real with me nailing a few of my photographic theses to the door – fortunately rather fewer than his 95 – and saying ‘Here I stand, I can do no other‘ – at least until I’ve had a few more beers – ‘God help me, Amen.’
Less than 95 theses
First, with apologies to Gunars Binde, a lovely man with fantastical pictures to match who told us we shouldn’t write about pictures. Bullshit! But then I would say that wouldn’t I (MRDA as we say in some English circles – ‘Mandy Rice-Davies applies.’)
Good writing about photography is as rare as hen’s teeth. The problem with most writing about photography is that it is not writing about photography, refusing to confront either process or product.
Good writing is a difficult feat and I stand with awe, marvelling at the skills of people such as John Szarkowski and Robert Adams. Just occasionally – and it’s most gratifying – I receive an email from a photographer that tells me I’ve made them realise new things about their work.
Its no coincidence that the Szarkowski and Adams are both photographers as well as writers. I’ve always considered that the people who know most about our medium are the people who do it. Those who have written most cogently have all had at least a reasonable proficiency at it and a firm grounding in its traditions.
Of course there are also plenty of good photographers who have not been able to articulate in any way about the medium, and some who have talked nonsense. But in so far as photography has attracted serious criticism rather than critical indifference, there are many to whom my response is simply that they have not paid their dues.
Visual language, some say, is universal. More bullshit. No two of us looking at a picture see the same picture. Yes, there will be some common perceptions that arise from our shared cultural and sub-cultural soup, but the way that we interpret the visual is critically dependent on our culture, our history.
For a trivial example, a triangle in England is simply a triangle, while in Poland it can signify and classify a toilet. Symbols such as the cross and swastika can also differ radically in meaning, for example between Hindu, Christian and Muslim.
Bullshit 3 is truth, or at least the idea that photojournalists and documentary photographers are on a mission to uncover it. Point of view is fundamental to photography. Literally and metaphorically.
Watching people photograph the proceedings earlier, photographers on the unfamiliar end of the lens, Bevis Fusha commented that digital cameras made it hard to tell amateur from professional, we all use the same equipment now.
But it isn’t the camera that matters. Working professionally (whether as amateur or pro) come down to point of view. Deciding what you want to say (metaphor) and getting in the right place to do it (literal.) Then of course there is knowing how to hold the camera – and a little luck.
Some months ago in one of those phone interviews where they work through a standard list of questions, a journo from and amateur photo mag came to “What is your favourite photo accessory?” I don’t think my answer, “Ten thousand miles of shoe leather” made it to print.
Truth is seldom simple. Facts look different depending where you come from. Photographers lack – and really need to lack – the Divine guidance needed for certainty. At best we have a personal integrity, an open mind and an honest vision. And make pictures that reflect the complexities of the real world.
Photography is an iceberg. Nine-tenths is underwater, hidden from view. Occasionally parts of that great mass break away and float to the surface – as when the work of Mike Disfarmer was published by Julia Scully and others.
Its instructive to think what a history or overview of photography written in the 1920s or 1930s might have looked like. We can be fairly sure that some of those who would have featured most prominently, for example, William Mortensen, author of Pictorial Lighting, 1932, Projection Control, 1934, Monster & Madonnas: A Book of Methods, 1936, The Command to Look, 1937, The Model, 1937 and more, are among those now largely relegated to footnotes, while the photographer many of us would regard as the most important of the early years of the century, Eugene Atget, would not have got a mention.
There are many photographers who are not particularly well-known whose work is of interest, and often of rather more interest than some of those who have made the history books. Fame is about being in the right place at the right time and knowing the right people.
Photography is not an American medium, nor does it belong to Dusseldorf. Much of the most interesting things that are happening in photography now take place away from these centres. Despite the efforts of historians and authors – such as Naomi Rosenblum – we still have a very long way to go in discovering twentieth century photography outside of the United States of America. (I wonder how much space Polish photography gets in her latest ‘World History’, being promoted during this festival.)
I’m ashamed to have written virtually nothing on Polish photography to date. However In my features on the web site ‘About Photography’ [1999 until 2007 when I was sacked for writing about photography] I try to show a world view of photography, for example with the series of features on photography in Central and South America. Along with the work of many others these have helped shine a little light on photography in this vibrant and active region.
In a very real sense there is no such thing as ‘a photographer’. We don’t exist in isolation. Our often fragile and fraught egos (often seen as evidence of artistic temperament) belie what we all know, that we are a part of a community. Our ideas, our pictures, build on the shoulders of others. Becoming a photographer is very much about connecting with this community. My talk is a very personal one, about some of the people – famous and relatively unknown – who have been important in my life and my photography.
This event in Bielsko-Biala is a powerful manifestation of that community, and one that has transcended our different nationalities, languages and status. The friendship, the fellowship I’ve felt here has moved me to the very bowels of my heart. But this is a community which I think is now under threat in two respects.
Photography for the media is becoming more and more a corporate business rather than an artistic endeavour. Mega-image corporations aim to monopolise image supply, cutting supermarket-style deals with photographers and image buyers, dragging down prices below that needed to sustain an individual approach.
In the fine art world, artists become increasing synthetic, predicated by the demands of the market (for example for limited editions in our essentially infinitely replicable medium.)
I am very much a grass roots person, a believer in participation as the basis of building better lives and a better society. What really matters is the ordinary and the vernacular, although when we examine them closely we find that they are very particular. We can perhaps learn far more about the real history of photography by looking at those who have not made the history books.
More pictures at FotoArtFestival Diary 2005.
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