The fear of even the possibility that our pool will be closed because of weather on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday drove attendance to today's two morning swim workouts beyond the usual scope and the parking lot was worse for it. Being at least as entitled as everyone else on the team I made my own parking space by taking over the spots generally reserved for the silly golf carts some people in the neighborhood use to drop by and play pickle ball. They are obviously not a priority use. Not when timely attendance at swimming is factored in...
So, here's what we know: It might get cold. It might freeze during the early morning hours. The weather people are generally wrong so we might as well prepare for the worst and then revel at the end about the overly pessimistic predictions of our TV meteorologists (what? do they study meteors???).
This has been a week of high mileage aquatic pursuits. We did 3,600 yards on New Years Eve, another 4,800 yards on New Years Day, solid yards on Thursday, Friday and Saturday and another 3400 yards today. The weather was gray and gloomy this morning --- at least at the start --- and just as we exited the locker rooms and headed out to face the day, post swim, the sun burst through and we've been under sunny skies ever since. Now the north winds are headed in and you can feel the temperature drop minute by minute.
I predict that we'll swim every day of the week but Monday. That's when the pool is closed to settle itself and rest.
If anyone is keeping score I did re-write that last sentence twice but to no great improvement...
But now, with swimming reports complete let's talk about perfectionism in photography. My take? The more perfect the technique and execution the more boring the photograph. The images most of the fans of Photography (capitol P, as in Art...) prize and revere are those by folks like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Elliott Erwitt, Martin Parr, Alex Webb, Bruce Weber, and Josef Koudelka. Images that catch life on the fly. No time for fussiness. No time for perfect hospital corners. No time for relentless previsualization. Catch as catch can. Grab it (the scene) while it's hot. Gestalt reaction over ponderous calculation. And anyone that tells you that all these folks think much faster than any of the rest of us and are making adjustments at the speed of light are bucking against any semblance of reality. They are just a bit more fearless about reacting to stimulus by pushing the shutter button instead of taking yet another moment and reflecting.
Those who fuss and fuss and fuss don't show up on any of my lists of top artists. I see them as plodding perfectionists who spend too much time sucking the life out of scenes in order to anesthetize the action and clean up the ragged corners of life enough to rob it of authenticity or even mildly joyous discovery.
Landscape photographers are the oil painters of our generation. Static. Plodding. Occasionally a lovely riot of color but rarely worth a second look --- except maybe as candidates for staid decor.
Writers are different. Words are different. I guess writers can ruminate and wrangle over exactly how to say something. How to write something perennially clever and illustrative. They don't have the burden of a binary response. An abrupt yes or no. And if they gloss over the appealing angle of authenticity they have the special privilege of going back into a manuscript and resurrecting it. How wonderful. If that's what they are doing. But waving a flag and screaming "look how smart I wrote this!!!" is counter to the affections of an audience who never wants to see behind the curtains.
Forcing tricky language to do too much makes the story flaccid. Sometimes the first thought is the best thought. Sure, you can mould it a bit like a flower vase in a ceramics class but eventually your interference in the process (sometimes called "tweaking") can destroy the original intention of design and turn your work from something that's perfect for displaying sprays of flowers into something you have to save by making it into another ashtray. Best not to touch a soufflé too often if you want it to rise as it should. Otherwise you just end up with a fancy but not very adequate omelette.
When I rail against re-writing a story or endlessly re-bracketing and re-composing a photograph I'm never against the idea of improving the art but in many instances I see writers and photographers try too hard for something that's never going to be absolutely perfect. And most stuff has no chance. Poets can try endlessly to create the perfect carpe diem poem but they will never exceed the sheer brilliance of Andrew Marvell's "Ode to His Coy Mistress" no matter how many keystrokes they expend. And all the film or digital card space you can bring to bear will never really improve a poorly chosen photo subject rendered in poor light. Or create a worthy rationale for the existence of yet another Stephen Shore "urbanscape/baseball dugout" photo. Regardless of the hoping that a different format will provide some magic.
Getting art right is like falling in love. No one I know plans out the act of falling in love. No spreadsheets are created. Nowhere is there a perfect mechanism for getting someone to love you back. You have to be yourself. Be brave in putting yourself out there into a relationship and not be afraid to make declarations that are neither rehearsed or rewritten. You fall in love the way you make art. Second by second, inspiration in the moment. Unalloyed and undecorated by second thoughts and re-dos. You never get an arrow back once it's shot. There are no do-overs on a rocket launch. You just have to go for it.
In my advertising work I sometimes have to throw away something I've spent time and energy on when, after sleeping on it, I get a flash of insight that there is a better way to show something. When that happens, if it's possible, I go back and reshoot. But when I'm shooting for myself there is no template I'm trying to match. I'm trying to recognize something as it is and capture it. And that always works better, looks better, feels better than anything I can set up and revise again and again. There is energy in the first attempt that goes missing on all subsequent desires to control the outcome. Tossing the muse out with the bathwater.
A click of the shutter is the inception. The first draft is the inception. I can improve a lot of my favorite photographs in PhotoShop and I guess, in a sense that's revision. And if a story is well conceived making corrections that move it along even better is the kind of revision I can countenance. But to re-write for the sake of re-writing or because the story repeatedly falls apart because it's a failed story is outside my boundaries. At least for my process. Maybe it works for others. Fiction is stranger than reality and maybe you have to beat it with a stick for a while to make it work. But a non-fiction essay is straightforward enough to spring from most rigorous minds as close to fully formed as it needs to be. Puffing it up? Security blanket for the ego...
These are just my opinions. There are no studies to prove or disprove what I'm suggesting. But I'm certain that photographs get brutally re-worked much more often in the days of endless digital potential than they ever did when changes were hard and expensive. By the same token I think endless re-writing has become a more common process/practice since the days when Flaubert and Tolstoy committed their stories to actual paper with ink pens and no escape to "white out." Just a thought. Maybe modern convenience such as word processing software and computers has led all of us to overthinking and over nitpickiosity. Too much time trying to gild the edges of already perfect lilies in a vain and human attempt to make them more beautiful.
I think I'll buy some black and white film, put it in the old Nikon F and go out shooting gestalt style. Might take the tatty taste of perfectionism out of my mouth for a spell.
If there are typos above rest assured I intended every one of them.
"perfectionists who spend too much time sucking the life out of scenes in order to anesthetize the action and clean up the ragged corners of life " That reminds me of the infamous Fred Picker from Zone VI. He was so insistent in the perfect negative, perfect Zone system light measurements with the calibrated perfect spot light meter, the perfect developer... his pictures were pretty cliche and dull.
ReplyDeleteFred Picker is actually one of the landscape photographers I was thinking about. Good call. Anyone with a spot meter has a hard time being impulsively creative. Good luck to them...
ReplyDeleteMeteorologist: one who studies hydrometeors (I.e., rain and other forms of precipitation).
ReplyDeletedb
Love it cut to the bone
ReplyDeleteI'm given to understand that the good poets and prose writers revise quite a bit, trying to get just the right way of saying something in words that will resonate with themselves and their readers. The kind of photography you favor is different. More spontaneous. I'm sure you don't think that Weston and Adams should have spent less time refining their images from negative to print.
ReplyDeleteGary, having just seen a show of Ansel Adam's prints at the HRC in Austin I think, yes, a bit less time in the darkroom and a bit more whimsy might have been advantageous for both.
DeleteWeston was much more spontaneous than AA in my opinion. Maybe that's what elevates Weston's images into a more artistic realm than AA's.
DeleteOne of the best writing blasts in a while Kirk. I've really come to appreciate my friends who learned to work fast in the age of film doing event and photo journalism and transitioned early to digital. I see the science of their moves match the speed need of the moment. I see younger folks doing it was well, just with a different thought process in the tools they use since they never had to work without the digital aids many us use as crutches. A fascinating set of case studies for people who like watching and learning from people.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of "forcing tricky language", and myself being a fine purveyor of the English (with a Capital E) language due to being a practising lawyer for 36 years, the sentence above: " The images most of the fans of Photography (capitol P, as in Art...) are those by folks..." makes my head ache. Just saying.
ReplyDeleteThanks. I agree it was a horrible mistake. Now remedied.
DeleteNice piece of writing, there. I'm not going to get too deep in the generally reductive argument of "let's define our terms," but most sane semi-perfectionists know they'll never get to perfection. Perfectionism in sane people is a tendency, not a hard and fast characteristic. I'm a long-time enthusiast of painting, especially the Post-Impressionists. Last week I was at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris with its wonderful collection, and it's amazing to see how often genuinely great painters screw something up. I mean, obviously screw something up. Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, sloppy work, clumsy transitions, even dirt...But. Overall, the painting is great. You can see where they're trying to get to. And compared to lesser famous artists, their qualities and abilities are obvious. I consider you a friend, but I can say I think you're striking a bit of a pose here: you know damn well that if you were working a serious assignment and you thought an important sequence you'd shot was somewhat "off," you'd reshoot. Still wouldn't be perfect, because nothing is, but you have the tendency.
DeleteThanks John. I liked much of what you wrote here. Yeah, if money was on the table I'd reshoot. Oh hell, I'd probably reshoot anyway. But you got what I was trying to get across.
DeleteThis is why complex, lengthy, deeply-nested camera menus are such a problem. They slow you down—prevent you from reacting quickly to the changing scene. For me, at least, the ideal camera is one I can set up in advance for various types of subjects I expect to be shooting, then provide me with easy to locate and clearly distinguishable manual controls for focus area, aperture, exposure compensation, and optionally shutter speed and manual focus. Nothing more. If modern digital cameras had been available to Cartier-Bresson, Frank, Winogrand, etc., I suspect they would have chosen point-and-shoot models.
ReplyDeleteErnest Hemingway once said "The first draft of anything is shit." While talking about writing, there is every reason to believe that this applies to a broad array of creative endeavors, including photography. The process of refining a piece of work, even multiple times, isn't in itself perfectionism. Keep in mind that Edward Weston's iconic "Pepper" photograph is rightly titled "Pepper No. 30."
ReplyDeleteYou may not like Ansel's photographs, and that's OK. You may abhor his working style, never wanting to adopt it yourself, and that's fine too. But I suspect it's not because Ansel was a perfectionist. In my experience, perfectionism keeps work from getting out into the world, and regardless of your view of Ansel, the man put a lot of work out there.
(P.S. The author Ryan Holiday has an interesting blog post discussing how flashes of inspiration evolve into finished creative works - https://ryanholiday.net/the-first-draft-of-anything-is-shit/).
Common wisdom is usually dead wrong. Tell me again who edited Picasso?
DeleteInteresting that you mention Picasso. While quite prolific, Picasso could be very much the perfectionist at times. His "Portrait of Gertrude Stein" was completed after some 80-90 sittings with Stein. So at the very least, Picasso edited Picasso.
DeleteThe subject of his painting "Guernica" was reportedly suggested to Picasso by the poet Juan Larrea. And the photographer Dora Maar, Picasso's lover at the time, is credited with influencing the content of the painting, including its black and white style - a departure from Picasso's use of color. Apparently even those at the height of their creative powers can have their work shaped by mere mortals.
Heard Picasso turned out Guernica in three days. And still had time to go to the beach with his other girlfriend.
DeleteLet me suggest another photographer whose shooting style with a 35mm camera may appeal to you, although I suspect he took a lot of care in framing his images: Roy DeCarava. He may even have pre-visualized! DeCarava certainly spent a great deal of time and thought in his darkroom, refining the images to his liking. The results were as far from straight prints as were Adams'. I recommend his retrospective book, recently published, that features his photographs over several decades. He was a master.
ReplyDeleteArt as a team sport? Fuck that.
ReplyDelete