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Photography
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.
