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Story and Photographs by K.B. DIXON

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The poor photographer. Things have not been easy for him lately. Don’t bother feeling sorry for him—he feels sorry enough for himself. Gathered here in this cluster of paragraphs are a handful of proofs—the photographer’s snapshots of ideas that a less lazy, less challenged, more doctrinaire photographer might have developed into written essays of varying lengths. In the aggregate they suggest a point of view, I suppose, but I am not sure I know what it is.

*

“A good photograph,” he writes, “is a magic trick that science can never fully describe. It is a transcendental transcription. The facts of it can be explained, but not the experience of it.”

*

The photographer sees his photographic archive as an idiosyncratic collection of personal responses to the world around him—a hybrid collection of documentary and aesthetic impulses. He is not proselytizing, illustrating a thesis, or championing a cause. He has little interest in the conceptual or sociological stuff although he has seen work in both categories (more in the latter than the former) that he admired greatly. The effort for him has been to capture a sliver of time—the graphic and psychological outline of a passing moment. Undoubtedly the viewer will detect the ghostly trace of a certain sort of temperament.

*

“What the quarterly critics want from photography these days cannot really be had from photography. The art form has its limits like any art form—like language, for instance. Finnegan’s Wake was not the beginning of something, as John Updike said—it was the end. What we see now in so much fine-art photography is a proliferation of Finnegan’s ‘Wakes’—distant, indecipherable variations on a vacant theme.”

*

Janet Malcolm once wrote an essay profiling the artist David Salle. It was titled “Forty-One False Starts.” In False-Start Number Thirty-Four she mentions visiting Salle at his studio where they talked about his work and life. She said she did not find what he said about his work interesting and then added parenthetically, “I have never found anything an artist has said about his work interesting.” Neither has the photographer. There must have been some exceptions to this rule, he thought, but nothing came immediately to mind.

*

“The art scene is full of heroes whose expressed intentions are to undermine the art scene. The undermining of the art scene is the art scene, and it is unremittingly and quintessentially boring. Because of mass production and the ease of dissemination, we are overwhelmed by poseurs. It is difficult to find Waldo anymore—to find the authentic maker of things.”

*

Early in James Joyce’s Ulysses Stephen Dedalus looks in a mirror and asks himself this question: “Who chose this face for me?” This is, the photographer thinks, the perfect title for a book of portraits.

*

“At what post-processing point does a photograph lose its legitimacy—cross over from the actual to the conceptual. How much alteration is acceptable? Do you make an orthodoxy of your preferences? When does it stop being a photograph and become something else—some other sort of image?”

*

“Photography is a poor way to explore one’s imagination, but an excellent way to explore the world.”

*

*

“One of the most unfortunate trends in photography is the artist statement. For many they have become as important as the photographs—and in some cases more important. Where there are all sorts of pictures being made, artist statements have become almost uniformly grandiloquent. They tend to be nothing more than polysyllabic sales pitches, efforts not so much to explicate or inform as to present the artist as someone substantive and profound—in other words, a good investment. The hope is that you will read the statement before you see the work and have your experience altered in its favor. If you see the work before you read the statement, the game is up. The statement looks like what it is—a casserole of claptrap, 10 pounds worth of buzzwords stuffed in a 5-pound bag.”

*

The photographer’s intention in portraiture is not to be kind or unkind, but to be honest—to give a nod to fidelity, the medium’s greatest strength. He is not trying to make subjects look better in the hope of favor—or worse, in the hope of achieving a reputation for seriousness. He is trying to make an honest image with a quaint reverence for the idea of truth—a thing usually debated for scurrilous reasons.

*

“There is a certain sort of photographer out there in the wild who plods along hoping to find a theorist with a penchant for hyperbole. They want a decorated someone who will overstate their case and generate the sort of attention that translates into a reputation—a reputation that translates into dollars that will give their images (and themselves) the protracted life they have dreamed of.”

*

“It is one of the more pernicious ideas afoot in the art world—that the only way to be an ‘artist’ is to avoid conventional art-making. It is easy to sympathize with this idea given the commodification of the enterprise, but what has been offered in its place are craven claims to virtuousness and courage rather than ‘art.’ I don’t think the answer to commodification is to produce uncommodifiable dreck. The problem needs to be attacked from a different angle. Issues of marketability should not be an artist’s concern—they are the concerns of the people working in the art business. If you are a supplier for the ‘business,’ it is one thing; if you are an ‘artist,’ it is another. If what you produce as an artist is marketable, so much the better for you in that you will have a nice place to live and food in the refrigerator. If it is not marketable, no amount of counterintuitive posturing will gild this gambit.”

*

The photographer’s bias is for straight photography. For a photograph to be called a “photograph” it should first and foremost be a fact. Insofar as it is not, it is something else—a collage, perhaps, or a composite.

*

“The magic of photography is one of its central characteristics. Time and again when photographers talk about what led them to the medium, they talk of being beguiled. We have become less superstitious as a species over the eons, but we remain enduringly vulnerable to encounters with the undemystifiable. A photograph is a unique thing in this rational age where enchantment is a perpetually contested luxury.”

*

These collections of the photographer’s are pictorial notebooks—efforts to capture an evanescent emotional reaction to a visual stimulus. He is not really trying to say this or that has existed, but that this or that has existed for him in a particular way.

*

The photographer is always a little wary of writing about photography. He is afraid that making paragraphs will interfere with making photographs—that in analyzing photography in general he will start to analyze his own photography in specific, and that would be catastrophic. Explaining a photograph is like explaining a joke: Fundamentals may be illuminated, but what is essential will not survive.

*

“A good photograph puts you in a trance. Its effect works on you in ways you are conscious of, but also in ways that you are not conscious of. It calls up ideas, emotions, and associations from your past. It tells you something you did not know you knew—something about your life that was important enough to remain with you, however vaguely, when so much else had passed on forever.”

*

“In the isolated moments of a photograph, one comes face-to-face with a conglomeration of incoherent impressions.”

*

*

“Everyone can speak, but not everyone is an orator; everyone can write, but not everyone is a poet; everyone can take pictures, but not everyone is a photographer.”

*

There are lots of things involved in producing a good photograph, lots of things in addition to the photographer’s aesthetic disposition—technical and compositional things aimed at enhancing and directing a viewer’s attention and experience for instance. The single most important thing for this photographer is color—or, more accurately, the absence of color. Color is information—lots of it. It is graphically and psychologically distracting. Black-and-white is a graphic and psychologically illuminating abstraction. If you remove color, what is left are the graphic and psychological essentials of a scene or a subject—a sort of extract of reality. It is a book-length subject.

*

“There are so many photographs out there now. The serious work seems to divide into two groups: the fine-art photograph (stuff no one really wants to look at) and the commercial photograph (stuff that everyone has pretty much already seen).”

*

“Whatever the ostensible subject, all photographs are also about light and time.”

*

The photographer has little interest in artist statements. He has never read one that made him like the artist or the artist’s work more, but many that have made him like the artist or the artist’s work less.  He believes naively that an image should speak for itself. If it requires a caption or a statement, it is not a photograph—it is an illustration.

*

*

“So much in the art world today is about games rather than art. The issue is not essence, but status. Some of these games are clever, but very few seem anything more than that. There is nothing clever about ‘appropriation’ for example, except perhaps the proponents’ efforts to make it seem there is. It is a parasitic adventure, an easy out for middling talents trying to pass plagiarism off as a post-modernist practice. For most of these people the work is secondary—it is the explanation of the work that is paramount.”

*

For the photographer it seems the focus of a good photograph, whatever the subject, is always on temporal issues—at least in part. He saw a photograph the other day by Paul Berthier taken in 1865. It was a figure study, a fleshy nude seated with her back to us on a featureless chaise in a featureless room. The photographer noticed a small bruise roughly the size of a quarter on her right thigh and found himself wondering how she got it and how it came to be that this afternoon, 150 years later, he would be sitting here interested in an answer to that question.

*

“There are a number of reasons for artist statements to be difficult, only one of which is valid—namely, that the issues at hand are impenetrable. Most artist statements are simply meretricious.”

*

“To dissect a process, one must first kill it. Perhaps there are some things in our lives that are better left ungutted.”

*

The contemporary fine-art establishment is a coalition of vested interests. They are not doing the medium any favors by relegating the idea of “visual interest” to the scrap-heap of philistinish pleasures. In a photograph, as in a painting, the photographer wants to see something he wants to look at. He does not want some ancillary item—some half-baked idea of intellectual profundity.

*

“A good photograph transforms instances into images, into moments that endure.”

*

“When the primary point of your photograph is conceptual rather than visual, it is no longer a photograph. A conceptual photograph is at best an illustration. The photograph has a unique relationship to reality. The more this is mediated, the less value it has as a document or an aesthetic object. It may become a component of some other sort of expression, but it is no longer a photograph.”

*

“To be a fine-art photographer these days you do not need an eye or even a camera—all you need is a theory. The more complex and otherworldly, the better. It will suggest to those impressed by syntax that you are a genius and worth at least x% more than poor old Photographer B who just takes pictures.”

*

*

The photographer’s hope is to capture an emotional or aesthetic response—to preserve it as an image the way a sentence may preserve a thought.

*

Saul Leiter’s color work reminds the photographer of the pictorialists in that he is striving to produce painterly effects. Somehow he has avoided condemnation for this, amassing accolades as a romantic eccentric instead.

*

“The essential function of a good photograph is to enrich the experience of reality.”

*

Brutality and banality—they are the twin clichés of photography. The photographer has little interest in either. He does not, however, eschew the exotic as too easy (though it can be) or the everyday as bereft (though it can be).

*

The photographer tries and invariably fails to capture the psychological and aesthetic vibrancy of a response and must resign himself in most cases to approximations.

*

A good photograph tells a story. The photographer has heard this said many times. At the risk of sounding hopelessly precious, he thinks it has a closer relationship to the poem than to the story—that it is allusive, formal, and breathtakingly efficient.

*

“All roads to a conclusion are serpentine. So too are all roads to a good photograph.”