Photography: Reading, Talking and Writing

The last is what I never have time to do. I've been shooting a lot. Reading some great things, too. Talking has been productive for me recently as well, although I always worry about what starts coming out of my mouth. When I begin to talk about the what I'm seeing, thinking and reading, I feel like I'm verbally untying a knot in real time. One of those nasty knots that requires the use of teeth. Not always a pretty sight when done in front of others.

But writing is the most difficult of all. I love to do it but it's challenging and time consuming. Challenging (in a good way) because it forces me to fully digest the things I'm seeing, reading, thinking and trying to discuss intelligently. I'm resolving to do more of it.

There's an odd lack of books about critical photographic theory that actually consider the act of seeing/watching. Most photo books investigate mediums and origins or explore the academic politics of imagemaking.

"The Photography Reader" by Liz Wells is an example of the latter. I'm sure a Marxist reconsideration of Edward Weston's motives is interesting and perhaps necessary for some, but for me it does not explain much about his seeing process. I can't relate to it because that's simply not what's going through my head while I'm making images.

The books I've found most rewarding are those which include the actual words of photographers or directly consider the physiological and psychological experience of seeing. These are a rare breed. Susan Sontag's "On Photography" is the best model I can think of.

I've found a few others recently that approach photography in a similar way. "Poetics of Space: A Critical Photography Anthology," edited by Steve Yates, is a book I've had for a long time. It went completely over my head when I read it years ago but re-reading it this year was a revelation. "Sculpting in Time" by Andrey Tarkovsky had the same effect. It was simply too much for me to absorb when I first read it about 15 years ago. It is the best explanation I've ever read about the humanism inherent in making images.

"Conversations With Contemporary Photographers" is wonderful because it is actual interviews with incredibly gifted and articulate photographers. Reading about the personal approach other photographers bring to their craft teaches me far more that actually looking at images in most cases. I relate more to their seeing process than the results.

"The Education of a Photographer" is also good, except, ironically, for the interviews at the end of the book with photographers who are teaching or have studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York. These 'interviews' are actually essays -- it appears the interviewees were given a list of questions and provided expository answers. They almost uniformly drift away from the wonderful investigations of seeing in the first three quarters of the book. However, they are interesting in that they constitute the current academic gospel on why and how photographers should be making images and how they should be taught to do so.

I'm reading the The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard right now. Just amazing. A portion of it was included in "Poetics of Space: A Critical Photography Anthology" and I've wanted to read this book ever since.

All of these writings about photography concern the process of representing space and time with lens-based tools. They look not so much at the image but the making of the image. I believe great images represent a feeling or emotion isolated within a particular place in time and space. Great images question without trying to provide answers and don't take reality for granted.

Memorial Day 2007 — Eyes Wide Open

I spent Memorial Day at the Eyes Wide Open exhibit in Grant Park. The exhibit consists of a pair of boots for each member of the U.S. military killed in Iraq.

The boots are arranged in rows by state. The long lines of boots are visually striking and reminiscent of a field of neatly arranged headstones in a military cemetery. However, the effect is much stronger. My eyes seemed to be trying to conjure-up all the invisible soldiers that my imagination was seeing standing at attention in those empty boots.

Each set of boots has an index card attached to it with the name, state and age of the person who was killed. Some of the boots also have letters and photographs that have been attached to them by family members, so they become these small, personal memorials. I went to the exhibit without a plan as to what I would be photographing, but soon started shooting the boots with photos attached to them. I ended up photographing almost all of them. You can see the collection of photos here.

The boots have been on display, often outdoors, for the past several years, and many of the attached photos and letters are decaying. To me this was a moving and powerful metaphor for the individuals who have died in the Iraq war; the photos seem to represent the decaying memories of those who have been killed.

The photos and letters also put a very human face on the tragedy of all the empty boots. As of May 28, 2007, the number of U.S. personnel killed in Iraq was was 3,455. I first saw this exhibit in 2004 when the number was about 500. On Memorial Day alone, 10 additional sets of boots were added to the exhibit.

During the month of May, 116 American were killed in Iraq, making it the deadliest month of the war since November, 2004.