* Tao Te Ching

* Dogen, Genjo Koan

This set of images by Robert Kinmot has been in my queue for posting since about last September. Quite a bit’s happened since then – we’ve moved out of our apartment, had it renovated, and moved back in, a process much bigger and more disruptive than expected. There have been a total of six moves – including house sittings and two sub-lets in a difficult Sydney rental market fueled by the hot summer and high traveler numbers.

Back to the images – they’re more powerful now than when I first saw them on the SFMOMA site. I know there’s a whole conceptualist backdrop to Kinmont’s work, but looking at these images now, coming back home (literally), I’m drawn at a more emotional level to Kinmont’s own homecoming – his return to art making after a 30 year break. These are poignant images from 1969. They remind me also of dusty roads around Rotorua New Zealand (where I grew up) – riding the Raleigh Sports on unmade roads through dark bush.

Then there’s the real home, the nondual ground, the sublime emptiness; the way the photographer’s eye relaxes into the natural humility and accepting lack of these dependable dust-brushed ways. Very beautiful.

Robert Kinmot
My Favorite Dirt Roads, 1969

Check out also Kinmot’s unpublished notes on the SFMOMA site, which add another level of story, an autobiographical richness, to this work.

Another image from Robert Adams: Landscapes of Harmony and Dissonance, a current exhibition at the Getty museum.

Robert Adams
West Edge of Denver, Colorado 1968 -1970
© 2009 The J. Paul Getty Trust. All rights reserved.

Adams, in the audio accompanying the image on the Getty site, says:

Two things, I think, brought me to make the picture: one, the loneliness of the figure, and two, the remarkable high altitude light which bathes the entire scene.

The traditional view of art, and I subscribe to it, is that art should delight and instruct. It’s in that sense inevitably political I think. The woman as she is isolated in that window suggests to me indirectly that there is something inhumane about the way our housing is conceived. The delight, if there is such, comes in the panoply of light that bathes rather mysteriously this frightening, dark isolation that is at the centre of the picture.

This is a powerful image from 40 years ago, one that strikes me all the more so after my recent Bali experience, where housing is conceived in quite another way. Partly this is due to climate, but also due to a collective view of housing (so there’s no homelessness), to arrangements of communal living that weave the need for housing into the overall ensouled process of everyday living.

Coming back to Sydney, our clean city streets seem in one sense empty (expunged of soul) and in another cluttered with traffic and (in the inner Eastern Suburbs at least) peopled by, to a greater or lesser extent, the homeless (in both an outer and inner sense).

Just read this recent Jacket interview – Noel King of Macquarie University Sydney, interviewing Frish Brandt of the Fraenkel Gallery about the work of Robert Adams. Reading and enjoying the images there, it got me thinking of a link I bookmarked earlier this year, Robert Adams: Landscapes of Harmony and Dissonance, an exhibition at the Getty museum.

Listening to the audio tracks on the Getty site, some fragments (from interviews with Adams) stayed in my mind. Here are those fragments accompanying his image Ontario Canada.

Robert Adams
Ontario Canada, 1983
© 2009 The J. Paul Getty Trust. All rights reserved.

… after I took the picture, as I was packing up the camera, a person in the house in the background loosed a pack of dogs on me, which I managed to repel with some rocks – it was a very hostile area …

… if you’d say “are those two crossed palms, which seem to be an cross on a death certificate, beautiful?” – certainly the object itself is not beautiful, but I suppose at some extreme end of things I would hope that finding a kind of order in the viewfinder of the camera does imply a measure of coherence in life.

… to offer a positive outlook in the face of despair …

… the operating principle that seems to work best is to go to the landscape that frightens you the most and take pictures until you’re not scared any more.

In these quotes I was struck with how there’s menace; how picture making for Adams is not necessarily a comfortable nor academic experience – it’s a complex process involving challenge, determination, an overriding ethic (the positive outlook), and also the expectation and experience of despair. Which in turn makes me wonder about the qualities I bring to my own picture making – who’s actually there when out in the world I make my images, and what my own relationship is to the world. An ongoing inquiry …

I’m also struck writing this now how the “backstory” of the image, for me, adds greatly to that image – an idea I guess I’m tussling with in my vispoems. And “backstory” can be thought of in different ways – from a description of the events relating to the picture taking, on up to the poetic and even mythic implications of those events.

Though in my own picture taking I’m usually more interested in depicting the traces people leave rather than the people themselves, I’ve loved the people-focused work of Cartier Bresson since discovering it in my 20s. Here’s a thoughtful article, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Last Decisive Moment in American Suburb X, by Bruno Chalifour, an article I’ve just come across. As Chalifour says, for Henri Cartier-Bresson:

from a simple way of seeing, photography became a way of thinking, feeling (with the appropriate distance), and a way of life, an evolution that would be confirmed by, and would extend into his experience of Buddhism.

Bruno sees that it was Henri Cartier-Bresson’s vision that made small-camera photography what it is today; how for many of us the framed space is still in some way sacrosanct, not to be cropped nor manipulated if at all possible, even in the digital age with its assumed freedoms in image production. This is certainly a tenet that is alive for me in my picture taking.

And although for me I’m interested in the gestalt, the whole movement of the photographer towards the “taking” moment and subsequently away from it (hence my related vispoetic texts sometimes say “episode”, “affair”, “tale” etc), this is not at variance with the true meaning of “decisive moment”: rather than freezing a dimensionless moment, Cartier-Bresson’s images:

…succeed in stretching time beyond its known limits. They scratch the thin surface of things upon which most eyes make daily ricochets, missing the point (… of entry, the decisive location).

Entry points towards depth! Chalifour expresses it well.

Postscript: American Suburb X also has a nice Gallery of Cartier-Bresson images.

I recently came across this UK Guardian slide-show (Saatchi artists at the Michael Hoppen gallery) on artists who manipulate photographs, or otherwise involve them in their art. All of this work’s interesting – and I particularly liked the work of Maurizio Anzeri, two examples of which are below.
Maurizio Anzeri
Giovanni and Leo 1953
Found photographs and coloured thread

There’s autobiographical information about the artist at Furini Contemporary Art and three more large images at art splash.

I’ve been thinking about the mask formed by the threads on these portraits – concealing yet always allowing us a possibly more intimate connection with the eyes (and often with the mouth) of the subject than what we might have had without that mask.

Then there’s the chords formed by the threads – a musical aspect that has me thinking of the scroll paintings of the Dada artists Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter, in which they tried to determine the principles of “rhythm in painting”. (To the left, stills from Viking Eggeling’s 1924 Symphonie Diagonale).

As Luca Tanzini says in this rich Music to Colours selection from the University of Siena:

the rhythm images hit the eye
like the rhythm of sounds reach the ear

Scroll down on the Music to Colours page for more on Viking Eggeling. And his Symphonie Diagonale is on YouTube.)

I came across this intriguing slide show Ready, Aim—Dream! Has photography blinded us to the reality of the American West? on slate.com and it raises the question yet again of what the photograph says and what it hides. As Sarah Boxer says:

Whatever image you chose [after bringing to mind images of the American West], you can blame photography, which has done more than anything to construct our vision of the West, whether it’s cowboys and Indians or parking lots and strip malls. If you have any doubt about this, check out “Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West,” an exhibition at MoMA.

We can’t help but “construct our vision” with and from the photograph – as John Berger has been telling us for many years, and as Boxer agrees with when she says “once you allow figures into a landscape, it’s hard to lock all narrative out”.

In fact, for Berger, better to immerse the photograph in an explicit textual narrative rather than leave it to a viewer-constructed one – as he discusses in his essay Uses of Photography, in About Looking:

The aim must be to construct a context for a photograph, to construct it with words, to construct it with other photographs, to construct it by its place in an ongoing text of photographs and images.

It’s interesting to contrast this view with that of Gary Winogrand, a photographer who came down strongly on the side of the photo being “complete in the frame”. Here’s a teaching video that features Winogrand in interview and the man on the street, doing what he did so sublimely, capturing those “complete in the frame” moments.

And Boxer in the above-mentioned slide show is attracted to the enigma in a Winogrand image:

One photograph I find difficult to place on the fantasy-reality-irony spectrum—which is therefore one of my favorites—is Garry Winogrand’s 1957 picture of a suburban house in New Mexico… there’s something aesthetically true about this picture.

This is, for me too, a great picture, and here it is:

And some quotes from Winogrand in the teaching video:

there isn’t a photograph in the world that has any narrative ability… the minute you relate this thing [the photograph] to what was photographed, it’s a lie… the thing has to be complete in the frame, it’s a picture problem… all there is is light on surface…

But so much context is inevitably left out of the single photograph. Here are some telling stills from the teaching video, showing the gestalt of a single picture event in the street life of Winogrand. I’m especially interested in the woman in red and the complex psychodynamics that are going on for her, as a stranger snaps her and her friend. Is it exploitative? – I’m not sure (but I know it’s not what I like doing) – but the point is there’s a complex dynamic that occurs over a short time period and that’s most probably not recorded in the image.

I guess it’s this gestalt that is intriguing for me, and how to allow it to be a part of the picture-making process.