because i have nothing to photograph and i'm too lazy to go to places to find such ridiculous thing, i've been looking once again for things to read about photography. which is a terrible thing to do. most people who do couldn't care less or are they too busy to or are mentally incapable to properly write about it. which is something that happens in a lot of hobbies and activities, but are terribly present in this particular case for some reason. their shorcommings can be superficially classified with much precision.
other people writting photography:
-too old
-theoric
-don't photograph
-photograph too much
-yapping about incresingly locuatious explanations and definitions about what photography is or isn't
The lure of photographs, their hold on us, is that they offer at one and the same time a connoisseur’s relation to the world and a promiscuous acceptance of the world. For this connoisseur’s relation to the world is, through the evolution of the modernist revolt against traditional aesthetic norms, deeply implicated in the promotion of kitsch standards of taste. Though some photographs, considered as individual objects, have the bite and sweet gravity of important works of art, the proliferation of photographs is ultimately an affirmation of kitsch. Photography’s ultra-mobile gaze flatters the viewer, creating a false sense of ubiquity, a deceptive mastery of experience. Surrealists, who aspire to be cultural radicals, even revolutionaries, have often been under the well-intentioned illusion that they could be, indeed should be, Marxists. But Surrealist aestheticism is too suffused with irony to be compatible with the twentieth century’s most seductive form of moralism. Marx reproached philosophy for only trying to understand the world rather than trying to change it. Photographers, operating within the terms of the Surrealist sensibility, suggest the vanity of even trying to understand the world and instead propose that we collect it.
what
i mean, more photos have been shot last week that during the entirety of the last century, and we still are meant to be reading people that are long dead about a photograph being a unique and singular object and the purity of objectivity and the whole nine yards. when they are not doing that, they are poststructuralists lost in definitions or trying to convince you that making photos is an art (which i don't disagree with, but don't see the point of arguing). or making a complete record of the origins starting from the camera obscura and queen cleopatra the first. they remind me that scene of bojack when students knew jack shit about acting but could recite from memory all kind of ridiculous definitions about it. there's so much fear.
most revealing is that they don't even shoot photographies at all. at least they dudes that write books about chess and can't help themselves from setting up pieces and talking to you about lines have the decency to actually play the damn game. i guess photographers are just not about that task, and so somebody has to do it. to that task, i have unanimously chosen myself to resolve this historic wrong an write a true essay about the subject to end this problem forever.
unfortunately, the first thing about photography is that there is actually nothing to say
or not much, at least. apart from complaining about other photographers and what are they clearly doing wrong or for the wrong reasons.
i remember that guy i know that used to take photos (used being the key word here) that complained that he was doing it less and less because he wasn't finding a way to express himself through it. which is a perfect example of someone doing something wrong or for the wrong reasons or the wrong way. that's the whole point of photography, i said. you're not in the frame.
in a more articulated way, what i meant to say is that, your self-expression is choice. choice in how and when and what you try to force at gunpoint to express itself. you're an afterthought, the invisible link. force it too much and the photograph dissapears entirely. that's a good thing. or at least, a different thing, from other forms of art. in which you desperatly try to amold nothing (or material nothing) into desperate meaning, conjuring it, coercing it, from the ground up. taking shots is more like a very aggressive kind of gardening.
and that's the end of the analogy.
so my formal background in photography is a class i crashed once in phyilosophy of art history or something like that, and that's about it. never even read a manual, and skipped through all the photography related videos i have ever found. but my visual background, that's another thing. i have been watching at things for a long time. since i was born, probably. but i guess i really started to adquire a visual aesthetic taste when i got into tumblr, a long time ago. there i was exposed to a series of images that maybe because of their nonchalant presentation made me look at things in a new way. so, my unconscious representations are not classical paintings nor other guys with cameras but a mixture of things i have seen during my life both in screens and with my own eyes: decontextualized anime scenes, naked woman, random webcomics, sci-fi fanarts, pinterest rejects, analogic nonsense, iconic scenes of movies and series i haven't watched, animals, outer space, the ocean, teenage philosophy, modified renaissance paintings, sculptures with letters in glitter, the lord of the rings, japan, ideosincratic anachronisms, wener herzog films, homer simpson, the color red and other things of that sort. those are my influences. well, that and a lot of TV in my infancy and teens, some anime, lots of movies, videogames and 10+ hours a day in the internet watching youtube or whatever.
why does someone like a photo or an image (or anything really) who the fuck knows people are insanely unhinged "this one has a dog on it" or "remembers me of cookies". try asking people, for real. they will maybe mention the texture, the lights, the colors. doesn't matter the mental gymnastics they do to try sound profound: they either like it or they don't. spectators manage to combine a total and utter indiference of the object with an insane specificty of taste. it's just puppies. random puppies. all the way down.
you could upload a milion winegrande photographies and people would only notice the one that has a lamp they also have at home. if you peel off the varnish and frame, there's no palpable difference between their reaction to a high end work that is supposed to hang in the world most prestigious gallery and something done with a phone. and that's not a critique of people, just an observation. on the aggregate of all possible public maybe it matters, but it's next to impossible to compose for an imaginary and fictional blob of humanity and that's why most artists default to fill what they call "their own taste". or so they say. more often what they do is calcify into a gimmick (and call it an style) that speaks to the lowest common denominator of a sector of the audience. god forbid the public appear on the photographies themselves, when that happens they become blind to anything else, even if theirs is buried in hundreds of other shots. if there's something people want to see or want to not see is themselves, the more they do so through a masquerade of objectivity the worse; they would risk seeing themselves in a light they don't control (or even worse, particularly like). then, out of the blue, they have a deep fascination about things that are alien or exotic and out of this world and unique. and then they have a photo in a particular place of mali that costs twenty buck to get in line for that reads almost as a diploma or archievement or life milestone haging on the wall for all eternity. what they like is random nonsense and at the same time the only legit feedback you can ever get. then after, they will come to me and show me a photo that they really treasure and consider very important in their lives and... it's just a totally normal unremarkable photo of something or someone. good luck.
the book i read that was decent about photos was too subject centric, too reporter-focused. trying to substitute a fundamental meaning of what you do with something more akin to a work ethic than a sacred scripture. but sometimes the subject is nothing. the times i have tried to make what i call "thematic work" i have found myself doing a parody of what i was trying to shot, trying to show a reality of something by forcing a conceptual exhibitable frame. most of the things i would like to photograph are things that are not there, or not there anymore. and i guess that's where the fascination with photos of dead people comes from. but because it's hard are requires time machines or incredible foresight there comes a litany of photos of a singer or whatever that try to make it look cool and perfect and clean by eviscerating it with a kitchen knife of all context making perfect subject photography that couldn't be more abstracted and meaningless from the thing that is supposed to hold all meaning in it. the text adovcated learning and documenting and planning, but most of the times i do photography as exploration. sometimes also documentation and many other terms with the same termination, but it's mainly an explorer thing. i grab the camera and go. have some ideas of what i will encounter but ultimately don't know. if i were, i probably wouldn't go at all. in that sense photography has been to me a incentive to go places and do things i would totally bail of otherwise. now i am trapped in a perpetual role of arbiter and observer of reality. people actually invite me to things. i didn't ask for this. the reason i picked it up in the first place was because there was some local festivity and i needed to kill time before meeting at midnight with a pretty girl i met the day before and sounded as an interesting thing to have been doing as well as midly interesting itself and that's what photography is all about. i think. not having enough sex. or not having sex "in that precise moment".
the first thing about taking photos is that it's easy.
the world is already there, you just press a button.
yeah there are a couple of things about composition and f stops and whatever, and editing is a can of worms but it's stupid easy otherwise. you literally just look and walk (a lot). a children can do it. and they do. a lot.
the amount of praise i have gotten for pressing that button totally dwarfs anything else i have done in my life. and even if the quoficcient between effort and praise is not a measure of value, that's kind of somthing to think about. i guess my heroism was "been there" and "judged that as something that could be in a photography thus transforming into something". but still, feels very unearned. cheap, even. the more photos i take (and i take a lot of them) the better they are and the worse i look. it's kind of distasteful if you ask me. i didn't understand anything until i took a couple of ten thousands of them. now, i'm an eminence in not understanding it still.
i don't like or am totally disinterested in other peoples photographies. i'm sorry, but i can't be the only one. and i like photos. i stare at photos when i encounter them. so imagine how much does someone who doesn't care cares, if i, that care, don't care. i just don't look for them. i encounter. and even when they are there, if they are to slowly be converging into showing a photo in black and white or a... sad clown or whatever you know what i mean, that's when i avoid them as much as im able to. you're not french, just were bad at sports when you were a kid. i have no interest whatsoever in what they do or what they photograph or why and how historic it is and my only critique to their technique is a quote from family guy about how the godfather movies "insist too much upon themselves". the photographer is just an inconventient thing i have to put up with to look at images, and sometimes it's the only thing in them. don't think for a second someone wants to look at your photos. if they bad, they boring, if they good, i just wish they were mine. you know that feeling when you go into an art gallery and some horrible modernist pictures that are worth milions of dollars but also look kind of nice are there and you think you could also do that and honestly, you could? it's that ,all the time. like thinking you should have bought bitcoin or apple stock. but you didn't, and you are right to feel ashamed.
tecnical jargon bores me to no end. it's important, yeah, somewhat. so is wearing socks, but not many people ask me about them, and those who do are major weirdos. it's also boring, a pathetic excuse to have something to talk about when nobody has anything to say. same as puting technical things in posts like the aperture you used, presuposing someone will attempt to recreate it. don't make me laugh. that's there for you own indulgence or to cover an ingnomious silence. i can count with one hand the number of times somebody has asked me for something related to the camera and it was relevant information. it's as going to a restaurant and asking the chef about his hat. ridiculous. hobbists obsess over gear because, deep down, quoting nietzsche, they fear death. or something. i don't have the exact quote you will have to trust me in this one.
more stuff i like (this time, vertical):
photography is inherently self-limitation. just a slice of in-between moments you could perfectly record entirely otherwise but choose not to. you are effectivly saying "no. not the entire thing. this particular moment has more power to explain this situation that an accurate recording of what is taking place. but video has recently canibalized the imagen orgy, and so the last refuge is to defend photos as "art" or "culture". when that happens to anything that once served an actual function or people wanted to actually see or listen to, you know whom the bells are tolling for. people just prefeer to look at videos. and the digital space has democratized any measure of sucess and transcendence into a clear cut metric of engagement and likes where everyone is effectively the ceo of it's own persona. and in that arena videos are better for retention, or some other eschatological mean. most content i see about photographies and cinematography are not photos or cinematography, but of selfconcious people with clickbait titles answering questions nobody asked and things nobody said that are somewhat about the process itself of using a camera or "being" a photographer or running theatrically after a train to take that perfect shot. because being, that's what all is about. being perceived as, seeing yourself in (that's also because the process of things have overcome interesest in things itself in a baudrillard stage evolution simulacra but that's for another day). the photograph itself is worthless in the sea of images without the fake narrative context of the author, and at most serves as proof that the actual process has happened at least at some point. which is not even always true. and they know it. when people see me with a camera, they often ask me if i'm a photographer, and always recoil with total desinterest or almost disdain when i say that i am not, that i only take photos. nobody could care less about subjects and selfexpression: selfexpression is they way you choose to disguise yourself as doing something an actual photographer or artists would do, without any regard as to what those things are supposed to be in the first place or how are they seen or perceived. forcing reality to fit your desired template of aesthetic. photography is not art, it's a vice, a compulsion. an enlightned form of vouyeaurism to be ashemed of. even people that do streams and tag them as photography want nothing else but to do other things like play games or listen to music. when i talk to them, it always baffles me the intensity of their desinterest about the subjects or photography itself; they are just in a battle to get a shot that could be abstractly considered as "good photography" and not much else. photographers hate photography, and the only reason they keep doing it is because they hate not being a passive observer even more, and being forced to interact with the world like a normal person would. to hell with the archetype of patient subtle obersever fond for details; you're not marcel proust, you have a canon in your hand and have to absorb light into a dark recepacle in a vodoo-like ritual of lichennian violence.
photography can't exist isolated from the act of taking photos. and that should be quite tautologically obvious, but apparently it's hard to accept to those who wish to distance themselves from the suburban middle age woman with an smartphone. half the fun about them is adopting the same nonchalant weightless effortless aesthetic that things happen to have when non-photography people take photographs, however impossible that's to achieve. after all, there's a limited number of photos of sunsets you can take before you get bored of it, and the more you photograph, the more you become obsessed with and romantisizing unassuming banality; which in a very funny turn of events it's the last thing most of the public wants to see.
i guess that what i meant to say is: nobody wants to see your photos. the same way you don't want to see your aunts family vacation, but that can change if the aunt is sexy, and at the same time, someone must want to look at them because people don't do other thing than to watch them in the instagram stories so i don't know frames are lame and galleries are dumb because photography doesn't need priests and everybody in the world can see my images already if they desire to thorugh one thing i like to call "the internet". what to do then to stay relevant, but yearn for antediluvian times where the gallery or the newspaper still hold value, where painting colors an high tech with black and white and add grain to force them to appear timeless or anachronistic wasn't necessary. to put white frames to invoke a false aura of prestige. to resort to gimmicks as stating "this image was taken this way with this random self-limiting process" as if the choice of medium and subject and moment weren't limitations enough themselves. where is the metaphysical justification to take photos in modern times? the answer, obviously, is that there is none. you need none. you just press the button.
and if that doesn't clarify the situation, i don't know what will.
nothing exists until it's photographed. and that includes the guy that takes the photo, that by taking it hopes to someday have existed. i guess my angle is that that's very bad. what a cursed gift to give things. at the same time, something that doesn't exist can't be photographed. that's the contradiction at the heart of the practice. independently of if photography relates to the real and it's relation to objectivity, reality has to be at some point of the process the source of any sufficiently convincing lie. for example, when i shoot music groups what i actually do is articulate a visual identity they want to see themselves reflected at. not truth. also, reality itself it's also just a convenient source to abstract content from and any fiction must in theory relate back to it; our dependence on it a happy accident that if we could (and we increasingly can) we would discard entirely to fabricate what are in essance just pixels in a screen arranged in a somewhat intended order.
in that sense a photo doesn't have more a privileged relationship with truth than any other art, but i guess i will admit it's an atypical one. that while that "choice" of when and what to shot, confers a particular hundreth of a second a certain... weight, or residual gravitas to it. it doesn't reach the epistemological heights of "meaning" but i guess it's a start. a launching pad that we abuse to no end but once accepted has to be sustained with an invisible and intractable "something else" for it to reach space velocity towards being something in itself. that's the hard part. how to do that, that's what photography books should obsess and talk about. maybe even what they try to do, in their own self-absorbed methodical way. you're not invisible. you're not manifesting truth.when pointed by a lens, the mind eye instantly opens. people start to think about who they are, how the look, where to stand, if to feign naturality, and freeze in place so eaten into their own neutered self-exploration while pretending it's not taking place that their expressions stop. i don't know how to solve that. as far as i know, it's not solvable at all. the presence of the camera changes everything. and it would be maybe more honest to not hide yourself but be part of the experience, which you already are by virtue of your existance. yes i am here, yes i am taking photos, yes this photo is about you. to turn it into a certain kind of conversation seems to me more natural that pertend that soul-stealing is not taking place. nothing helps more than being actually consumed by your blatently sentimental activity while at the same time being totally aware of its kitsch.
but if you've ever once been the object of that terrible blank round glass stare, you know all too well how paralyzingly self-conscious it makes you feel. a harried guy with earphones and a clipboard tells you to "act natural" as your face begins to leap around on your skull, struggling for a seeming-unwatched expression that feels so impossible because "seeming unwatched" is, like "acting natural," oxymoronic. try hitting a golf ball right after someone asks you whether you in- or exhale on your backswing, or getting promised lavish rewards if you can avoid thinking of a green rhinoceros for ten seconds, and you'll get some idea of the truly heroic contortions of body and mind that must be required [...] to act unwatched as he's watched by a lens that's an overwhelming emblem of what Emerson, years before TV, called "the gaze of millions".
david foster wallace
our subjects fear us, and we fear them. we fear them because of their reactions, because of the invisible lines we don't like to cross (but have to) and the reality we fear to shatter. they fear us because of that still effective atavic power of images to define how things are. and that fear is a sign we're doing something right. that it still holds some vitality. we give up control over perception, shielding in a shyness that is more resembleing of a cowards way of vanity that social inedecuacy. in that sense, photography biggest rival is not a moving image, but the household mirror we contort ourselves around, looking for an acceptable angle in which to be perceived. at the same time it elevates the prosaic into the sublime, it trivilizes everything from something that has come to be into something that already kind of is. in that sense photography talks the universal language of memories. something about it talks to the potential future when something will no longer be there and we will look at it with completly different eyes. a photo is the last night in a half empty apartment you lived in for years and are leaving forever the next morning. just weird, unreal by virtue of something being insanely familiar and yet decontextualized of everyday life. it's insane that to articulate such delicate language we accept as it's normal instrument of expression a machine gun. photos, like runes, engrave themselves in the personal and collective unconscious of people, forever cementing themselves in the backrooms of the cultural substrate of the society that generates and consumes them. but then, that also can be told of some brands of mayonaisse.
and i don't remember what i was talking about. i will summarize.
no separation casual and artistic intent no intent subject no subject objective subjective
you press the button and kabooom, instantly like magic, nobody cares
__________________________
On Photography (Susan Sontang, 1972)
La Chambre Claire (Roland Barthes, 1980)
On Being A Photographer (David Hurn & Bill Jay, 1997)
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume III (Edward Gibbon, 1777)
Tumblr (David Karp, 2007)
The Social Photo (Nathan Jurgenson, 2019)
E Unibus Pluram (David Foster Wallace, 1993)