Evolution (or, I was wrong)

A month or so ago, I wrote a post the gist of which could best be summarized as “concept schmoncept.” The thing is, I was wrong. Much of my argument was based on the premise that writing and photography are similar—and on my own fear that photography would become as paralyzing for me as writing had become. (For many years, I thought I wanted to be a writer. Even went into hock to get a master’s in writing. I make my living as an editor, and what I found was that I couldn’t turn off my internal red pen—it was always at the ready—and writing was no fun at all.)

As I got into photography more seriously (finally getting back to what I wanted to be when I was 10), I started immersing myself in the world of photo blogs and art mags and reviews. And I realized that concept loomed large. Pish posh, I said. Nonsense. The thought that all that analysis could kill the radio star, that I might someday be standing with my camera in hand and be unable to release the shutter because all I’d have running through my mind would be a bunch of isms . . . well, I wasn’t about to let that happen.

I’ve continued reading and thinking, as I’m prone to do, and over the past week or two I’ve seen how misguided I was. Fear is a very strong motivator, but rarely a good one—maybe if it’s what gets you to run from an ax murderer, but not if it keeps you from engaging your mind in your work. And that’s what I was doing. I was going out and taking pictures and refusing to think about what they meant to me, why I was drawn to certain subjects, what I was trying to say, because I was afraid that if I started thinking like that, paralysis couldn’t be far behind.

The final epiphany came this morning as I was reading an old interview with Brian Ulrich on Conscientious. Here’s the bit that got me (I’m taking it out of the context of a discussion on the diCorcia lawsuit, but the meaning is still the same—for the full conversation, click here):

On any visit to a museum one can overhear the comments of “I could do that,” “What makes this so special?”, “Who cares about a urinal on a pedestal?” And that is exactly, in some cases, the point. But some of modern art has created a distrust by the general populace because Duchamp (whom I love) and others showed us that art is in ideas not in objects. This is very liberating, but if art is no longer “special,” if we remove craft from art, then it needs academia to explain it. Without reading some didactic panel, the work is then just a urinal, no magic, easy to dismiss.

This isn’t a new idea, of course—as Ulrich points out, Marcel Duchamp originated the concept of the found object or the readymade, and in so doing put the emphasis squarely on the artist’s declaring of the object art. In many ways, the kind of photography that Ulrich does and the kind of photography I most admire is a photography of found objects. In Ulrich’s photos in shopping malls, big-box stores, and other retail outlets, he’s showing us what we see every day, and he’s saying something about our consumerism and making us examine ourselves in the process. The concept—his message really—matters even more than the technique.

I need to start involving my head a bit more in my photography. As I was telling my boyfriend in an e-mail today:

Yeah, I guess, though, that it would be good to have some kind of idea in mind about why I’m interested in a subject. Why am I interested in that? What does it say to me? If I know the answers to these questions beforehand, it’ll help me in saying yea or nay to a particular image. I guess what I’m saying is that I think I already know the answers to these questions somewhere—I just haven’t articulated them. It’s more instinctual now. Okay, so here’s the deal: You hear about actors talking about training versus instinct. There are some actors who operate solely on instinct. They don’t think, they just act. Then there are other actors who really break down a character, look for motivation, do research, etc. But I think the best actors are able to do all the latter stuff and then, when the time comes to walk out on stage or in front of a camera, they revert to instinct. But all the research and stuff is still there inside of them and informs their performance. They’re not thinking as they’re acting, “I think I’ll draw upon that time when my puppy was drowned by my evil stepfather to evoke the emotion in this scene.” They’re just doing it. I think that’s what I’m saying. That I need to at least do a little thinking about this stuff so that when I go out and take pictures, I’m more informed about why I’m doing it in the first place.

Copyright © 2007 Liz Kuball