Photography: The Treacherous Medium

I read The Treacherous Medium by Susie Linfield again. In her 2006 article, Linfield asks why so many people who write about photography hate it so much, why even the act of looking should be so wrong, why photography should (as it is by Susan Sontag) be characterised as...“grandiose,” “treacherous,” “imperial,” “voyeuristic,” “predatory,” “addictive,” “reductive,” and “the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”

She goes on to write about the emotional element of photography as well as its multi-faceted nature, how one genre overlaps into another, how boundaries are blurred and identities mistaken - and possibly how this happens more often than we care to understand in contexts that are presented as otherwise.

I think that is one of the things that appeals so much about photography is this multi-faceted nature - the different claims people make for their work and the different claims we as viewers make for it on their and our own behalf. There are many claims but I think one of the most interesting is the normative claim - when people (who may be conceptual or art photographers more than photojournalists or documentary photographers) are presenting a world not only as it is, but how it should be, if only because that is the way it is - it could be otherwise but which do you prefer. I like to think that is what I do with my pictures as well, but how far I succeed is another question.

How Not to Photograph: Photographers' Psychosis and The Long Runway

picture: Colin Pantall - from the Series, Jakarta: Everything matters, The Truth is Out There

Next up in How Not to Photography is The Long Runway. This, for Howard and Mittelmark is the one in which a character's childhood is recounted to no purpose. It is especially apparent in photography of children where the process of recording a child's life becomes obsessive and uncontrolled and every little detail has to be recorded and it becomes a lifetime's work that will never be finished because it will take a lifetime and everything just becomes unmanageable and out of control.

Here, the long runway just goes on and on and on - it's a runway without a destination about a subject that holds little interest to anybody else except for the besotted parent.

That's why, for all the photography of children made in both an informal and formal sense, there has been no satisfactory holistic depiction of the essence of childhood; partly because this is something that is so hard to depict visually, partly because the photography of children that does exist focusses on particular aspects of childhood in controlled and stable environments - so losing the emotional and physical chaos of childhood that is essential to a child's being. To make something meaningful, you have to get snippets and hope they resonate off each other, or else you are completely doomed. Instead of the Long Runway which goes nowhere, you have a series of day trips which you hope will present some further insights.

The Long Runway doesn't just apply to children though, it applies to anything one loves, anything where a degree of psychosis and OCD kicks in. And when the obsession kicks in, so does the need to explain, to provide the backstory of how this place, these people, these things came to be. I used to do this in Jakarta, photographing everywhere and everything, because what people really need to understand, and will obviously really be interested in (because I'm interested in it) is well, everything about the place - the transport, the people, the housing, the politics, the food - on the macro-level, the micro-level and the interaction and the outside world, because once you understand that, you understand everything. Because it all matters, it's all essential and how could you not be fascinated by it.

The idea is that by piling it all in, by revealing every aspect of a place and documenting it through the power of photography (and some pretty lengthy captions) , some grand and shining truth will beam out through the fog of randomness. My obsession is the key to everything!

Eugene Smith's amphetamine fuelledPittsburgh psychosis is the obvious example of this, but that is just the extreme of extremes. You can see it everywhere, we all do it, no matter where we are or who we are, just not as well as Smith, who did do it rather well. And the solution is simple enough - it's called editing. That and writing a book about it, rather than making photographs. Oh, and getting out more. That's always an important one.