The Chase
Every since Helen Liggett referred to a quote regarding Lee Friedlander’s “excess of fact” I’ve been trying to chase it down. It really bugs me when people don’t follow up on their sources. The trail on this one is long and silly. It starts here (approximately), in this passage from Liggett:
Street photography is a procedure that connects daily life to representation and thus it is characterized by what photographer Lee Friedlander calls an “excess of fact.” “It’s a generous medium, photography,” he writes (Armstrong 2005,293). In part this is a description of the type of photography he produces. But it is also an acknowledgement of how crowded the referent in un-staged photography necessarily is. Photographic space is more complex than a photographer’s interest in a single object or viewers’ tendency to think of images as being about a single subject. The complexity of any site generates a photographic space that leads to the proliferation of meaning in much the same way that urban life is not fixed, but constantly in motion. The visual cacophony produced by street photography evokes a radical urban aesthetics by pointing to the gap between the work and an audience’s reading of it. What is radical about the excess of fact is that a space is both presented and unfinished.
The Armstrong article is an Artforum review of Lee Friedlander’s 2005 exhibition at MOMA. I drove to Minneapolis and picked that up. It lists the source of its quote as an interview with Friedlander by Peter Galassi in the exhibition catalogue. That massive tome was checked out, so I recalled it. I picked it up yesterday. It cites the source of the direct quote as an article called “excess of fact” in Friedlander’s monograph The Desert Seen. Did Friedlander even utter the phrase? I’m beginning to have my doubts. The University library doesn’t seem to have that monograph; I’ve requested it via interlibrary loan. So close, and yet so far!
Booya
On the lack of motor capacity
The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect. The conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the human form. Scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic. Here, curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between form and its surroundings, the visible presence of a person in the world. Jacques Lacan has described how the moment when a child recognizes its own image in the mirror is crucial for the constitution of the ego. Several aspects of this are relevant here. The mirror phase occurs at a time when the child’s physical ambitions outstrip his motor capacity, with the result that his recognition of himself is joyous in that he imagines his mirror image to be more complete, more perfect than he experiences his own body. Recognition is thus overlaid with misrecognition: the image recognized is conceived as the reflected body by the self, but its misrecognition as reintrojected as an ego ideal, gives rise to the future generation of identification with others. The mirror moment predates language for the child.
Laura Mulvey “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975)
Lawnmower
All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical.
The wheel is an extension of the foot; the book is an extension of the eye; clothing, an extension of the skin; electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.
Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change. (26-41)
. . .The technology of the railroad created the myth of a green pasture world of innocence. It satisfied man’s desire to withdraw from society, symbolized by the city, to a rural setting where he could recover his animal and natural self. It was the pastoral ideal, a Jeffersonian world, an agrarian democracy which was intended to serve as a guide for social policy. It gave us the darkest suburbia and its lasting symbol, the lawnmower. (72)
Marshall McLuhan, The medium is the MASSAGE (1967)
Time
President Salvador Allende and first lady Hortensia Bussi on the balcony of the presidential palace La Moneda, 1970
The first (and oldest) photograph in the book shows Salvador Allende and his wife on a balcony in La Moneda, the presidential palace, waving handkerchiefs to a virtual multitude, where the photographer has submerged himself so that we might be the silent beneficiaries of that trivial gesture, maybe done enthusiastically in front of an exhilarated crowd; but in the light of events, with that tragic force that photography always reveals (its revenge against the superficiality with which it is used), it rather seems that Allende and his wife are saying goodbye. We will not see them again in the book. The photograph proves painful beyond any ideology.
Marco Antonio De La Parra, “Fragments of a Self-Portrait” Chile from within, ed. Susan Meisalas (1990).
Watching a 1982 interview with Garry Winogrand on Bill Moyers, I was struck by this bit:
Muscle and Memory
“All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.”
Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: The New Version, p.5.
AP: For someone whose pictures are so well known, you yourself have remained elusive. Don’t you like to talk about photography?
LF: It’s not a pleasure to talk about one’s work, and I don’t know how to talk about it. Photography is a bit sacred to me. When you base your life on doing it—as I do—you don’t always want to know the mechanisms.
AP: Would it be possible to say, then, that you make your photographs instinctively?
LF: A photographer is stuck with that moment, so it almost inevitably is instinctive. You don’t think about it before or after you do it. A painter or writer can re-work something, but a photographer can’t really do it again. The sun goes behind a cloud and the whole thing changes. If you asked that question of an athlete, he wouldn’t be able to say how he makes the choices he makes in a game. Photography is quite similar to athletics—more so, maybe, than to art.
Allison, Sue S. “Q&A Lee Friedlander: A Reluctant Subject Lets Loose” American Photographer 12:3 1984 (52-54)
Zoing
Inspired by Perc and Rudolf Arnheim
More Deathblogging
It was with great sadness that I read that Mr. Wizard is dead. My lovely wife was stricken as well. Though we are separated by many years physically, mentally there is a connection that passes through the Mr. Wizard show. Watching all the obits pile up on Richard Rorty, I was most pleased by Jurgen Habermas’s remembrance. It seemed more personal somehow.
It was also with some shock that I learned via Krause about Rudolf Arnheim’s death. There isn’t much out there yet. You’d think that living to 102 would grant you some coverage by the press. Besides the Ann Arbor paper, the only mention so far seems to be in the Washington Post. I was rereading Visual Thinking a few months ago, and had tabbed out these paragraphs in his chapter on “Visual Education” as worthwhile:
In the arts, then, the student meets the world of visual appearances as symbolic of significant patterns and forces in a manner quite different from the scientific use of sensory information. Sights that are accidental with regard to objective situation become valid as carriers of meaningful patterns and can be called truthful or false, appropriate or inappropriate by standards not applicable to the statements of science. But art not only exploits the variety of appearances, it also affirms the validity of the individual outlook and thereby admits a further dimension of variety. Since the shapes of art do not primarily bear witness to the objective nature of the things for which they stand, they can reflect individual interpretation and invention.
Both art and science are bent on the understanding of the forces that shape existence, and both call for an unselfish dedication to what is. Neither of them can tolerate capricious subjectivity because both are subject to the criteria of truth. Both require precision, order, and discipline because no comprehensible statement can be made without these. Both accept the sensory world as what the Middle Ages called the signatura rerum, the signature of things, but in quite different ways. The medieval physicians believed that yellow flowers cure jaundice and that bloodstone stops hemorrhage; and in a less literal sense modern science still searches the appearance of things for symptoms of their characters and virtues. The artist may use those yellows and reds as equally revealing images of radiance or passion; and the arts welcome the multiplicity of world views, the variety of personal and cultural styles, because the diversity of response is as legitimate as an aspect of reality as that of the things themselves. (300-301)
