I’m a technician. Not an artist. I have no doubt about that. So why do I pretend to make photos? (in the Ansel Adams sense)
When I was a kid, my parents registered me at a music school. I was going to learn to play the organ (the thing with multiple keyboards and a foot keyboard most people associate with churches). I have no idea why they decided that instead of piano, but that was their decision. I was 8 and I didn’t argue. I went every week. I did it for 10 years.
Over time I got fairly good. Better than my teachers, eventually. One of them tried to convince me to become one, but I had no interest in spending my time explaining things over and over again to kids. I love explaining things to people who want to understand them. I hate teaching kids who don’t necessarily want to be there (and that include university kids that I had to teach during my PhD).
One of the things that all my teachers consistently told my parents was that I was technically very good. There was nothing I couldn’t learn to play and I was able to read a new sheet and play it in near real time (which isn’t easy). There was no doubt I could become a great player. But what I lacked was a sense of art: I would play strictly what the music sheet said without deviating an iota, like a machine.
That’s what I wanted, though. Why follow a sheet of music if it’s not to follow what it said? A guy (most likely, historically) spent a lot of time writing a piece of music, why would I play it any way other than what they wanted? I didn’t understand what they meant until many years later.
Webster: “art: skill acquired by experience, study, or observation”
As I said before, I’m a literal thinker (probably due in part to autism). I often say I have no imagination and unless I have already seen something, I can’t think of it. That’s slightly exaggerated, but mostly true. I remember mentioning it to a teacher in high school and she said it was really sad. But it only is if you lost the ability. I never had it.
That applies to my photography. Although I think of what I want before I know where and how to make it happen, it’s never out of nothing. It’s born in existing scenes I’ve seen, it’s an amalgam of sensations and feelings I had before, it’s created from bits and bobs I have experienced or seen before. I don’t feel I could be a portrait photographer that thinks of new scenes or poses out of nothing, for example.
So to me, a lot of photography, as with most of my hobbies, is about building something: observatories, telescopes, software, genealogy record, and photographs. I don’t approach photography as an artist that needs to create a piece of art of art’s sake. I approach it as an idea of the final product, a set of techniques and technologies, a bunch of rules I can use to get there, and a plan. When everything is in place, I’m ready to take photos.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t have the need to create like an artist would, and pleasure in the production of the work. I do feel the need to go out and create the photo I have in my head as an artist would feel. It’s an urge that becomes physical eventually if not satisfied. And I do feel the pleasure of having attained my goal and produced the thing I needed to produce. It’s a kind of deliverance from the need to create, a sense of freedom again from the prison of the need.
In that, I don’t think the artistic process is purely limited to artists. It’s a universal process; something people might go through in a lot of unrelated domains, art or not. And the existence of that process isn’t enough to call something produced through it “art”.
Webster: “art: the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects”
To me, to be art, an technical activity needs two additional things:
- It needs to live for itself. If I create something because I feel like it, I don’t feel it’s art. It’s for me. It’s something that makes me feel good/happy/sad. Others might find it interesting/good, or not, that’s not important. What’s important is that the piece doesn’t live for itself. It’s not something that needs to exist through me as a maker. Nice pictures of landscapes aren’t things that needed to come out, the landscapes were there and I just happened to see them whilst I had a camera. If I capture something that’s there through a technical process, I didn’t make it as an art piece. It’s been a long time an argument against photography being an art form.
- It needs to say something to the world. It might not be a significant thing, flowers aren’t important, but the way they are made into a painting can say something to the world about the artist’s perception of that world (e.g. impressionists). It can also be something significant (e.g. Guernica), but doesn’t have to be.
The first point is the most important one for me. The second one is needed to define art, but isn’t sufficient: you can say something to the world through technical pieces because you have a technical vision, a new idea, or you invented a new process through experimentation (e.g. cyanotype).
The need to let something out is something I have felt sometimes. It’s unease until it’s out. It’s the sensation that things aren’t right because that thing needs to be made. It’s an obsession of thought until the thing is out. It eats your life and your time. It’s uncomfortable, sometimes painful.
That is not the same as “intent”, though. Art is not born from intent. Or rather, intent isn’t sufficient to produce art. I’ve heard many people say that because they photograph with intent, i.e. they know what they want to produce, they create art. That makes them good technicians, not artists. To be art, the piece needs to come out, whether we want it or not. It goes beyond intent into need or compulsion territory.
The last difference between being a technician and an artist is that once the work is produced, I lose interest in it completely. It’s done, goal achieved, urge satisfied, move on. I don’t feel what I did has any intrinsic value (its only value is that I needed to produce it), and certainly not any value to anyone other than me. The end product is a thing produced by technique applied to a tool, nothing more.
I do keep my photos and I archive some in print. But not because they have intrinsic value, solely to create a record of what I did over time. It’s more of a diary than pieces of art.
Am I the only one thinking like that?
#Photography #Opinion #IMayBeWrong #Theory #PhotographyTheory