How not to Photograph: Dr Frankenstein's Make Yourself a Monster Workshop Clean-Up Shoot

picture: Colin Pantall - I'd lose my head if it wasn't attached


The town of Wilkes-Barre in Pennsylvannia will always have a place in my heart. Partly because the Bechers made some of their loveliest industrial landscapes there. But mostly because Mark Cohen made his Grim Street pictures there.

By day, Mark Cohen is a gentleman, a gentle gentleman. By night, he transforms into a photo-psycho, flashing his rangefinder into people's faces in true shoot-and-run style. This isn't big city in-your-faceness, Cohen does this in a moderately sized town where there is little anonymity and no camouflage from the big crowds (see him at work here).

The results are marvellous disjointed affairs where limbs, torsos and heads are lopped off in the name of Cohen's art.

I love it because Cohen's decapitations and dismemberments are a pyschological depiction of both Cohen's own neuroses and fears as well as a portrayal of industrial America as a fractured, dysfunctional society. The pictures are part of a package in other words - a package where the photographer, the location and the subjects and their body parts all fit together in a coherent, if somewhat mysterious and bleak, discourse. It's Frankenstein photography, with Cohen as the body-snatcher, cutting off bits of people with his camera, only to unite them in his Dr Frankenstein moment, when that little spark of Cohen psychosis is enough to bring the monster of the parts to terrifying life.

For the rest of us, those of us who aren't photographing in this manner as a way of life, dismembering your subjects so you end up with a series of pieces of arms and legs, bodies and heads is an exercise in Frankenstein photography - but the kind where there is no lightning spark, where all we end up with is a bin full of rotting body parts - random fingers, eyes and legs that have all been cut off for no reason discernible to man or beast.

So we should all do ourselves ( and each other) a favour and stop with the photo-mutilation. Enough already! No more cut off hands and legs. Except when they have rings on them, or they belong to babies. Because that's different!

How not to Photograph #1: Monkey Art, Slight Plots, the Bechers and McGinley

Colin Pantall: Dead Pigeon #77 (from the project 100 Dead Pigeons)

In their book, How not to Write a novel, Newman and Mittelmark say that there are lots of books on how to write a novel, but none on how not to write a novel. With their blessed sarcasm, they say "...if reading Stephen King on writing really did the trick, we would all by now be writing engrossing vernacular novels that got on the bestseller lists." Which isn't the case, so Newman and Mittelmark decided to provide the service of offering observations on how not to write a novel.

It's the same with photography. There are loads of books on how to photograph. They will tell you how to use long exposures, how to be creative using fancy things like multiple exposures (double the exposure and double the meaning), how large format will really bring out the detail, and so on and so on. In other words, the simple functional How to... books of photography pretty much cover the heady world of art photography from top to bottomus.

It's simple stuff, but simple is good, especially in photography, which is basically a monkey art.
Writing isn't a monkey art. You can give a bunch of monkeys typewriters and it'll take them a squillion years to come up with the works of Shakespeare. Give a bunch of monkeys (or better still bonobos) an old Yashica, an unlimited amount of film (and some orang-utan assistants to change it) and presto, you'll have the works of Ryan McGinley in no time at all.

Ryan McGinley's work has been critiqued very nicely here on the grounds that his subjects are all a bit too young and white and well-to-do and perky in an androgynous kind of way.

Which is all true, and of course his work is about lifestyle and Water Babies and the Never-Never in more ways than one, but that is what makes it somehow memorable. His cast of characters are indistinct, they are uniform and have a shared identity, they are McGinley's Stepford children. Nothing about them is memorable and that's what makes them special, that's why they stick in our craw, why we can't just shake them off. They are anonymous nonentities slotted into these timeless, generic scenarios who fit with a time and a way of thinking, they are a fantasy, part of a bubble that has burst. They are already part of the past, a visual footnote to the boom before bust.

I personally despise McGinley's subjects for who and what they are just out of blind prejudice for young, white, rich (though not always ) Americans gallivanting around naked in water and fireworks and having more fun than me - and I think that is half the point of the work. We are supposed to have a little bit of envy because they are having such a fun and nice time and they are so young and carefree and seem so sweet and nice. Would I want to do the McGinley road trip if I were a little bit younger? Fuck yeah! Wouldn't you?

And the other big thing is McGinley does it in a way that breaks free from the charm-free earnestness that predominates in the art and photography world. And for that we should be thankful.

Anyway, back to Newman and Mittelmark. Their first observation on how no to write a novel is 'The Plot is too Slight'.

Which says it all really. This is trying to tell a story where there is no story, or not enough of a story or a story that isn't interesting to anyone except the writer, or in our case the photographer.

We can all think of examples of this. I photograph my daughter. This is interesting to me, but to others it may not be. Indeed, as a genre, photography of children is definitely a case of The Plot is too Slight. What is interesting about my child, how she plays, how she dresses, how she sees, how she watches television, is possibly only interesting to me. Maybe there is no story, so move on, find another subject, join the real world.

Take the Bechers as an example. The Bechers have a lot to answer for. They make beautiful pictures of industrial architecture. Their images resonate off each other, the care and attention paid to figure and ground creates a visual grid where the whole amounts to more than the parts, there is a reference point that extends into a mysterious ether where the formality dissolves into something quite different. Their pictures are interesting and beautiful because they are the Bechers.

Which doesn't mean your or my pictures are remotely as interesting, unless we have the same time, dedication and sectionable obsession to photograph the objects of our affection. Yes, we can photograph every kind of egg whisk, or bathtub, we can typologise every aspect of our waking and sleeping lives. We can capture the vernacular of consumption, of fashion, of the human, but ultimately who cares - the plot is too slight. A picture of an egg whisk is still a picture of an egg whisk and nothing more, and most times 100 pictures of egg whisks are just that, 100 pictures of egg whisks. Which is worse than just the one picture. Similarly a picture of a water tower is still a picture of a water tower, and nothing more, and 100 pictures of water towers is just a one way ticket to sleepsville. Unless you're the Bechers of course.

What can we learn from these pictures?

pcture: Larry Sultan


A few months ago, somebody said to me "What can we learn from these pictures?"

It's a bewildering question that presupposes so much, in particular that the purpose of photography is education learning.

But it's not. Photography doesn't teach us anything. It can show us things, it can make us revel in the beauty and the horror of it all, it can create emotional links between what we see and the lives we lead, the world around us, but why should we
expect it to teach us something. Even photography that comes in a book, with words, like Larry Sultan's Pictures From Home, doesn't teach us anything. But it does make us feel, it ties in ideas of land and home and family and creates a historical backdrop against which we can conjure up our own version of the truth.

Martin Parr once said that "All photography is propaganda" and he's absolutely right once you flip that round so that it becomes "All photography is true". But it's a truth that is visceral, emotional, non-rational and connects to a socialised visual reading, the same kind of reading that made Pieter Hugo say that "If you really want to know about anything - a war, a place, a person - you go read a book, right? You don't look at a photograph."

So if you want to learn the nitty-gritty of post-war migration to California, the who, where, when and why, go search the history section of your local library or do the simple thing and google it.

But that won't tell you about the cultural history of the migration, about the home, work and family and the disappointments of success or even what success really is. Larry Sultan's book won't tell you about that either, but it will lead you into places where you can feel the history in a way that words and statistics never can.

And it will do that because a photograph or a painting can touch us in places words can never reach. Pieter Hugo's hyena pictures, for example, don't teach me anything apart from a little footnote that guys in Nigeria make money with hyenas - I didn't know that before he came along. But the images have a level of uncertainty, a power and an elemental sense of rawness that combines with the post-apocalyptic nature of developing urban environments that carries them way beyond the bare socio-economic bones of how these people lead their lives.

And that is the way with all photography. It doesn't teach us anything, most of the time what it shows is blindingly obvious - teenage girls worry about their bodies, industrial structures are both ugly and beautiful, alcoholic parents create domestic mayhem and so on.

The work doesn't teach us anything, but why should it. It takes us to places we might normally not go and interweaves unconscious elements in ways that are far richer than any linear written narrative can do.