I came across this intriguing slide show Ready, Aim—Dream! Has photography blinded us to the reality of the American West? on slate.com and it raises the question yet again of what the photograph says and what it hides. As Sarah Boxer says:
Whatever image you chose [after bringing to mind images of the American West], you can blame photography, which has done more than anything to construct our vision of the West, whether it’s cowboys and Indians or parking lots and strip malls. If you have any doubt about this, check out “Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West,” an exhibition at MoMA.
We can’t help but “construct our vision” with and from the photograph – as John Berger has been telling us for many years, and as Boxer agrees with when she says “once you allow figures into a landscape, it’s hard to lock all narrative out”.
In fact, for Berger, better to immerse the photograph in an explicit textual narrative rather than leave it to a viewer-constructed one – as he discusses in his essay Uses of Photography, in About Looking:
The aim must be to construct a context for a photograph, to construct it with words, to construct it with other photographs, to construct it by its place in an ongoing text of photographs and images.
It’s interesting to contrast this view with that of Gary Winogrand, a photographer who came down strongly on the side of the photo being “complete in the frame”. Here’s a teaching video that features Winogrand in interview and the man on the street, doing what he did so sublimely, capturing those “complete in the frame” moments.
And Boxer in the above-mentioned slide show is attracted to the enigma in a Winogrand image:
One photograph I find difficult to place on the fantasy-reality-irony spectrum—which is therefore one of my favorites—is Garry Winogrand’s 1957 picture of a suburban house in New Mexico… there’s something aesthetically true about this picture.
This is, for me too, a great picture, and here it is:
And some quotes from Winogrand in the teaching video:
there isn’t a photograph in the world that has any narrative ability… the minute you relate this thing [the photograph] to what was photographed, it’s a lie… the thing has to be complete in the frame, it’s a picture problem… all there is is light on surface…
But so much context is inevitably left out of the single photograph. Here are some telling stills from the teaching video, showing the gestalt of a single picture event in the street life of Winogrand. I’m especially interested in the woman in red and the complex psychodynamics that are going on for her, as a stranger snaps her and her friend. Is it exploitative? – I’m not sure (but I know it’s not what I like doing) – but the point is there’s a complex dynamic that occurs over a short time period and that’s most probably not recorded in the image.
I guess it’s this gestalt that is intriguing for me, and how to allow it to be a part of the picture-making process.
