RonPrice
Joined: 27 Oct 2004
Posts: 26
Location: George Town Tasmania Australia
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 Posted: Sun Mar 04, 2007 5:36 am Post subject: Some Provocative/Stimulating Thoughts |
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I always think photographs abominable and I don't like to have them around, particularly not those of persons I know and love.-Vincent van Gogh, "Letter of September 19th, 1889," The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh.
Due to the physical action of light and the chemical action of development there is a tangible link between what was photographed, through the developing process to the gaze of the viewer. It is a process involving something that has been, due to the photograph as an object, due to the action of light, due to radiations that ultimately touch me and due to the photograph being something for the gaze, the visual memory, of the viewer. The photograph of a missing being, Susan Sontag says, touches me like the delayed rays of a star.-Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977.
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At the age of sixty-two I now possess a dozen albums of photographs of various sizes and shapes. They could represent a significant aspect of any autobiography I might want to write. This essay, this part of a chapter of this book, tries to put all these photographs in perspective, tries to provide readers with my personal hermeneutics of the visual, at least that part of the visual that got packaged into these twelve albums in a culture which gives hegemony to the visual. More generally, too, I provide here in this part of my memoir a fragmented, an episodic, examination of the phenomenon of seeing. What the famous Italian film director Federico Fellini said about film could also apply to my photographs. "My films are not for understanding,” said Fellini, “They are for seeing." This essay, though, is about understanding. Perhaps it will be useful to architects in their exercise in seeing, a lifetime process.
The French sociologist and philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, said that "no matter which photographic technique is used, there is always one thing, and one thing only, that remains: the light. Photography is the writing of light and this light is the very imagination of the image. Baudrillard sees his photographs as making the world a little more enigmatic and unintelligible, as exposing the very unreality of the world of appearances. Any photograph is never of any “real” world, but rather, it is a record of the momentary appearances behind which the real hides. To him, the world is essentially illusion. I certainly sense this as I look back over nearly 100 years of photographs in my dozen albums. Perhaps this notion will have some euristic value to those at this site with architectural pretensions.
Our contemporary culture of digitization and image-glut actually shrivels the ethical force of photographs of whatever type intended to elicit compassion, sensitivity or the milk of human kindness. In an age in which spectacle has usurped the place of reality, photographic images still have the power to evoke shock and sentiment. Photographs are the fragmentary emanations of reality, the punctual and discrete renderings of truth, rather than the uniform grammar of a consistently unfolding tale. I would hesitate, then, to draw on my collection of photographs, however numerous, however bright and shiny, colourful and clear, as evidence of the unfolding tale of my life. They relay and transmit diffuse assemblages of affect, without necessarily appealing to the coherent, narrative understanding of an interpretive, rational consciousness.
The photographic frame is not just a visual image awaiting its interpretation; it is itself actively interpreting, even forcibly making a statement. Sontag, one of the late 20th century's most provocative writers about photography, said that where "narratives make us understand, photographs do something else. They haunt us." Our age, she goes on, is one in which "to remember is more and more not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture." Given the sheer sweep of the visual image in contemporary culture and politics, I struggle to come to terms with the nature of memorialization in all its forms effected by photographs. I ponder as to what is the kind of affect relayed by photographic images as discrete and punctual fragments of reality. What, I ask myself, is the semiological universe that is being called into play by such dissociated transmissions of affectivity.
The culture of 'image-glut' gives us a harried and in fact beleaguered document of reality. I am on my guard that these words of mine do not turn into something that is little more than a frustrated rant against the inhuman multiplication not just of images, but of the sacrilegious settings in which we see them. The place of the image in an era of information-overload, and the capacity of the image in such a landscape to infinitely, and perhaps "irrationally," multiply its significations in relation to continuously mobile variations gives me cause to ponder. To photograph is to frame and to frame is to exclude. My dozen volumes of photos have indeed excluded most of my life.
Kodak has closed its film laboratories and processing plants in Britain and the United States since the turn of the millennium. At this point in the twenty-first century, however, we can still look back on 150 years of a familiar and domestic photographic technology; and I can look back on 100 years of black-and-white prints, the little-changing record of my affinal and consanguineal family's life, my Bahá’í family or at least that part of it that got in front of a camera while I was around and a wide range of friends and associations beginning in 1947. The power of revelation due to photography is undeniable. My photos look back on a very small section of 99 years(1908-2007) of that century and a half within the confines of my family, friends and many of the landscapes where I have lived, moved and had my being.
I have been working on this essay on photography for nearly a decade now, since the late 1990s. It finally has a form that is useful and, although not entirely satisfactory, it is appropriate to include in this autobiography.(now 2500 pages but not published) Much more work on this essay is required, but its relevance to my autobiography has at last some clarity to me and so I include it in this fifth edition of my memoirs, entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs. I have found the content of this essay one of the most intricate and complex of all the sections of this autobiographical narrative but, because the ideas are important to me--and I hope to some readers--I want to include them. The ability of photography to record some of the types of the minutiae of social life and some of the architectural wonders and not-so-wonderful wonders makes it an ideal method for dealing with a number of aspects of the autobiographical process and some of the complexity and richness of the human situation and its visual appearances and appurtances.
Many people see much more in photos than they even do in written text; for these people,my photographs and the commentary are indispensable. Of course, as Andre Malreau once said, “Images do not make up a life story; nor do events. It is the narrative illusion, the biographical work, that creates the life story.” One could ask: is architecture part of the world's illusion or does it help create the life story of all of us?
The human tendency to look at, to be drawn to, the pictures, the photos, before the print seems universal--at least in my experience. If I had the technological competence and the money, I'd include many of the photos of people, places and things in my memoirs. Sadly readers will find none in this work--only print, from left to right, the familiar a to z stuff that is now turning off millions of the modern men and women of the world.
Vision's perception are active ingredients in understanding's creation. When we observe something, then we reach for it; we move through space, touch things, feel their surfaces and contours. Our perception structures and orders the information given by things into determinable forms. We understand because this structuring and ordering is a part of our relationship with reality. Without order we couldn't understand at all. The world is not just raw material; it is already ordered merely by being observed. And photography helps in this ordering process; indeed, our very way of looking at so much of the world is now determined, in part at least, by photographs. Photography gives us an immense amount of experience that normally would be outside our range. The fragment is so often elevated from irrelevance to positions of some priviledge. We are able to see what we looked like as children for the first time in the last century and a half, since the birth of the Baha’i revelation. The photos are full of vanished details of the way life was lived – the styles of chairs, of clothes, of hats and bathing costumes, of accessories like spectacles – and of a wide range of intriguing bits of human activity, especially the buildings in which life was lived. As one critic put it, photographs may stimulate, inspire, or seem to document autobiography, but whether they in fact do is another question.
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Here are two prose-poems that place this subject of photography in what I hope is a helpful perspective:
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TELLING THE STORY
Most of us, without particularly meaning to, have accumulated--from commercials, from ads in magazines, from picture books, from movies--a mental archive of images of the West, a personal West-in-the-Mind’s eye in which we see an eternal pastoral, very beautiful but usually unpeopled. These potent images, pelting us decade after decade, finally implant notions about how the West was explored and developed, in a word, won that are unrealistic. Photography has helped to redress the balance little by little with its rich but disordered resource. Over the last seventy years studies of various kinds and the occasional autobiography, like We Pointed Them North(1939), have helped to alter the picture that is engraved on all our brains from TV and the movies: Roy Rogers, Gene Autrey, the Lone Ranger, Butch Cassidy, et al.-Ron Price with thanks to Larry McMurtry, “High Noon”, a review of The New Encyclopedia of the American West, editor Howard R. Lamar, Yale UP, in The Australian Review of Books, December 1998, pp.17-19.
The enterprise began, perhaps as early as 1894 when the first Baha’is landed in America from the Middle East, or even when the Letters of the Living travelled throughout Iran in 1844 and thereafter. The twenty-five years from 1894 to 1919 was a precursor to the year 1919 when the Tablets of the Divine Plan were read and a pioneering program began that is now eighty years old. It is a program that is immensely diverse and operates at local, regional, national and international levels. It is important, as the Baha’i community comes to describe this vast and complex story, that it avoids a tendency to an affinity with the reverential writers of medieval England, to endless edification and to what is called hagiography. There is a need to emotionally individualize stories so that readers will not have to wade through hundreds of pages of reverential, pious and lifeless prose. -Ron Price with thanks to Edward Morrison,”When the Saints Come Marching In: The Art of Baha’i Biography”, Dialogue, Vol.1 No.1, Winter 1986, pp.32-35.
Defining character,
determining worth,
touching on the personal,
bringing people out of
verbal concrete,
through understanding.
Needing an eye
for telling detail,
a certain dramatic power,
analysis and interpretation,
with incisiveness and conviction,
with no doubt about its being true,
a willingness to deal with the unpleasant,
for we need more than a glimpse.
We need the story of the saintliness
in all its unsaintliness.
It is as difficult to write
a good life as to live one.
We want to know we are not alone:
for the community is its own ritual,
the greatest drama in the world of existence,
something forever new and unforeseen,
devoid, in writing, of appearances and pretentions,
a mysterious development, this writing, of many values,
conveying to the reading public insight
and a knowing who they are into their lives.
For a great life does not make a great book.
Ron Price
1 February 1999
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A DOCUMENT, A RECORD
The Metropolitan Museum of Art held a retrospective in April 2000 on the photographical work of Walker Evans. I know nothing about Mr. Evans, but his photography was an interesting document on his times, a record of his days and years, the sentiments and styles in the first half century of American history and a personal autobiography. The brief summary I saw, perhaps ten minutes, on The News Hour with Tim Lehrer went by so quickly I did not catch it all. But it had something to say, indirectly, about my own autobiographical work. -Ron Price with thanks to The News Hour with Tim Lehrer, 5:00-6:00 pm, 7 April 2000.
Showing my world as I see it:
a poet warrior, heavily armed
with the stuff of my life,
my world, my religion—
my playful and not-so-playful
energies, moods and desires--
a document over three epochs,
a record of my days,
not so plain and simple,
clear and visually straight
from the shoulder as Evan’s work.
But, with Keats, an almost instant
transmutation of impressions, thoughts,
reading and ideas into poetry, well,
what some might call poetry, what
I might see as a study for poetry.1
1 See Robert Gittings, Selected Poems and Letters of Keats, Heinemann Books Ltd., London, 1981(1966), pp.8-11.
Ron Price
7 April 2000
(revised for:
‘This So Called Life’
18/2/06)
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The Gestalt psychologist attests that only the organization of materials into a concrete and meaningful image can fully express and communicate the whole of universal experience. Without this direct portrayal of awareness and nature, the art stands incomplete within the natural world, and therefore is nothing. All continued human activity, of which photography is but one, requires a continued supply of activating energy, and no energy comes forth without a motive. The effect of photography is not what I see in, say, my vacation snapshots, but a tendency to see only the present as something that exists; our human energy seems to focus on the now. And of course only the present can be photographically recorded. The rest of time, the past and the future, exists only in the imagination. Old pictures show an old present. Photograph albums tend to produce in the viewers a permanent now, a continuous present. I think this was, not so much a dominant attitude, as a daring and for me a useful affirmation.
The writings found among media theorists and in the humanities and social sciences are sprinkled with such affirmations and often tend toward a provocative style of writing and thinking about photography and its substance. But the result of this analysis is often gross overstatements, particularly when media developments are causally related to other social-cultural or political phenomena. Even accepting a certain overstatement, though, I find my twelve albums of photographs do record a series of ‘present moments’ that are useful in reflecting on my autobiographical experience. All of this visual material does not capture the complexity; they transcend it, compress it, repress it. The paradox inherent in the presence of photography within autobiography is the photographs’ tendency to simultaneously document and yet undercut the narrative.
During these four epochs the camera has been for many the official family recorder. Film, video and the digital camera have come into play in the fourth and fifth epochs after, say, the mid-eighties. But for most in the West, in the cultures where I have spent my time and life, the camera has been a silent witness to many of the important stage in life, from birth to death. Photography’s social functions are integrally tied to the “ideology of the modern family” and the medium allows for and provides a sustenance for an “imaginary cohesion.” The photographed family can easily show us what they wish the family to be, though this may not often be the case. Photography operates at the junction between personal memory and social history and it requires an engaging narrative to act as the key to unlock the intricacies and complex nature of the “true” family behind the iamge. This memoir will function partly as that engaging narrative but, since my focus is only peripherally—and not centrally--on my family, its intricacies and complex nature will not be unveiled here beyond a few broad brush-strokes.
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Enough's enoug!
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Ron Price is a retired teacher, aged 63. He taught for 35 years in pre-primary, primary, secondary, post-secondary and seniors schools. |
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