SZ: Gilbert and George, another art couple, don’t perceive themselves as two individuals any longer.
HB: Of course, for them it’s a role-playing game. But for them it’s the truth. We knew them quite well. Even back in the 1960s they often came to visit for coffee and cake. Sometimes I made dinner, back then they were still excited about my meat patties. These days, I wouldn’t do that any longer. They’ve all come to be so spoilt now.
Interview with Hilla Becher, translated by Jörg Colberg (many thanks!)
Today, we’ll be driving to Milwaukee. I was interested in seeing the Gilbert and George show, but when I found out that Stephen Shore is speaking at the Haggerty Museum nearby, that clinched it. Shore (and the Bechers) were both part of the “New Topographics” exhibition that I mentioned a day or so ago. It’s been a very artful summer so far.
The interview with Hilla Becher brought into focus some of the hair-splitting I’ve been doing regarding photography and nostalgia, which I actually started thinking about when I read Gary Sauer-Thompson’s post regarding amateur vs. professional photography.
Amateur photography is about constructing personal mythologies through snapshots in the form of family and travel albums that are intrinsically linked with nostalgia, longing, and presenting the best view of ourselves.
So maybe it is moving beyond taking snaps to working on specific projects that is the new way of being seen as a professional as opposed to amateur?
I don’t think that it is any sort of “rule” that artists work in specific projects—most that I’ve met are usually working with multiple (and vague) ideas at any given time. The idea that one could wake up in the morning and decide what one is going to say is ludicrous to me. Why would I bother to seek out expression for something that I already understand?
As both a writer and a photographer, I think of expression as a form of doing/learning rather than saying or showing. As expression, it is intrinsically personal, but not necessarily autobiographical or nostalgic. In fact, dispensing with those distractions is in many cases the most important step towards taking a more “professional” (in my perception of the term) approach. Stephen Shore expressed this well in an interview with Aaron Schuman about his “diaristic” approach in Uncommon Places:
AS: . . .the way I see Uncommon Places is as an autobiography, but an autobiography of looking; an autobiography of seeing.
SS: I would say that is very accurate. I don’t expect someone to look at this and have any particular sense of what I did in my life. But what it is about is my explorations, my travels through looking.
But Gary Sauer -Thompson’s point about the connection between photography and nostalgia is a good one. The longing of the “Newer Topographics” photographers for something other than the given “mythology” of place/time couldn’t really be classed as “amateurish”— far from it. It is simply a different response from the “New Topographics” photographers like Shore, who owe much to Walker Evan’s technique of photographing everything as if it were old. Evans conveyed and exploited this form of nostalgia, hiding it within his “neutral” aesthetic stance. This is precisely what Becher explores in the interview translated by Colberg:
HB: . . .In the beginning, Bernd wanted to preserve and bring back his childhood with those images. In the Siegerland, he grew up between ore mines and furnaces.
. . .
SZ: Do you think of your work as romantic?
HB: Our attitude was romantic, our images are not. We tried to erase this feeling from our images, we didn’t want people to notice.
. . .
SZ: Your oevre traces a straight line through history. There are no news in them, no Cold War, no student movement, no re-unification.
HB: That we did on purpose. We always said: We cannot comment. We never took sides during a strike. You can’t criticize when you want to photographically conclude something. We were not siding with the capitalists, and we were not siding with the exploited. Those words don’t fit, it’s all way more complicated than that.
The key sentence for me is “You can’t criticize when you want to photographically conclude something.” This is the “topographic” position, at least in the form that I internalized it, and the corollary is that you cannot glorify what you photograph either. Therein lies the paradox, really—in the act of photographing something you are intrinsically glorifying it by declaring it significant. All photographs are constructed from the past, which makes them tend toward nostalgia—and they all tend towards critique or romance because they assign significance to what lies within their borders, and minimize that which they exclude. The power of New Topographics lies in its ability to highlight and explore this thorny issue.
Professionalism, as defined by equipment choice, only means embracing a nostalgia for past processes which defined a different function for photography. This can be productive in its own right. The most extreme case of this I can think of is modern daguerreotypes. The digital side has other challenges, other potentialities. I have grown enamored of the metaphors of flickr—the “photostream” of images rather than the framed and isolated single product. But there is a price, as Stephen Shore aptly sums up in an interview with Colberg:
I see digital as a two-sided phenomenon. The fact that pictures are free can lead to greater spontaneity. As I watch people photograph (with film), I often see a hesitation, an inhibition, in their process. I don’t see this as much with digital.
There seems to be a greater freedom and lack of restraint. This is analogous to how word processing affects writing: one can put thoughts down in writing, even tangential thoughts, with a minimum of inner censorship, knowing that the piece can be edited later. The other side of this lack of restraint is greater indiscriminancy. Here’s a tautology: as one considers one’s pictures less, one produces fewer truly considered pictures.
I’m really looking forward to hearing Shore in person tonight. But for those who can’t make it, I also noticed a nice video piece here.
