One Might Ask: On Photography
One might ask, in this age, with a camera in every phone, a phone in every hand, and every hand outstretched for a selfie, why bother? Why bother with photography – when every moment, both illustrious and less than, is captured, and when every image is potentially a lie? We have all these selfies and all these pictures created in Photoshop and the like, of impossible purple sunsets that never existed, phony waterfalls that run like cream, of faces too contrived and perfect to reflect souls.
This is not even to mention that soon enough artificial intelligence will be producing these at a pace that will more than satiate our lust for unreal perfection, as well as put the Photoshop experts out of work.
Except for those courageous beings who yet go to our wars, our famines, our demonstrations and riots, the disasters, and who pictorialize both the greatness and the hypocrisy of our leaders, those righteous witnesses who document our brutality, our exploitation of one another, and too, our remarkable (at times) kindness, along with the savageries and ecstasies of the human condition, the age of the great photographers is over. Indeed, the age of photography is over.
Can it possibly make sense to create a photographic tableau after Julia Margaret Cameron? Can one picture the human form, or any form at all, any better than Imogen Cunningham, Edward Westin, Robert Maxwell, or even Robert Mapplethorpe? What has not been shown about the demoralization of American poverty that Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans documented so plainly? Is there anything further to be said, after Margaret Bourke-White and Lee Miller (remarking later that the stench of Buchenwald never left her nostrils) photographed the charred bones of the dead and the ghastly faces of the living, in the concentration camps of Germany? Who can improve upon the humanity of the great Life Magazine photographers – Grey Villet, in the case of the Lovings, documenting the tenderness of love for each other and one’s children coupled with the cruelty of the body politic, or Gordon Parks, who forced us to look at the tears of a Harlem family in the belief that their cry would be heard?
It goes on and on and on: why, after Lisette Model on the streets; the dream visions of Manuel Álvarez Bravo; Sanil Janah giving us the faces of starvation; Yousuf Karsh showing the souls of his sitters; Eugene Smith revealing Tomoko Uemura in her Bath; Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin displaying the intimate experience of the outsider; Martha Rial documenting the trek of refugees of Rwandan genocide, Liu Zheng throwing images of plain, truthful humanity into the faces of lying dictators?
And so, one might ask: since Mozart has already composed The Magic Flute, why did Copeland bother to write Billy the Kid? After Edward Hopper painted Nighthawks, why sink to the artistic bottom and copy soup cans or resort to wrapping buildings in fabric? Indeed – soon to engulf us – once artificial intelligence can compose music, choreograph dances and stage operas, write novels, and generate spontaneous pictures and movies, why do anything at all?
It has all been done anyway, and now we are in the age of technological-photographic terminal silliness, the age of interminable, party-face selfies. It is as Marguerite Duras said in 1985, before smartphones, before digital cameras and Photoshop, with absolute clairvoyance: “Everything seems to be done in order to spare man the effort of living, both in his work and in his daily life. It is terrible.”
Indeed, I agree: it is terrible.
So, then, why photograph at all?
There are only three answers, I think. The first is most important. It is to bear witness, to carry on the humanitarian tradition of photojournalism, for those that have the heart and the stamina, to witness and document our inhumanity to one another and our violence against nature and the planet. That is the worthiest and we should thank them, for it comes at great cost: Kevin Carter killed himself after winning the Pulitzer Prize for his photograph of the vulture stalking the small, starving child in Sudan, in 1993.
The second is to show us the beauty, the ordinary and mundane, and the ugly, so that we might realize and become conscious beings.
And the third is because we do not know what else to do, and if we are not taking pictures, then we do not feel right, we do not feel quite fully alive.
I cannot claim the first. I do not have the courage – the heart and the stomach – for it.
With the second: I can only aspire.
And so, my excuse is the third. I do love to take pictures and I don’t feel quite right when I am not doing that. To reflect on Duras’ observation, it is an act of doing, it is making the effort of living. It is to take a walk and notice things, to point the thing we carry at what we notice, to press the shutter button, and then to come home and later (only later) check, holding one’s breath, to see if there is anything in the box that tugs us.
PSC, June 10, 2020, revised March 18, 2023.