Hi friends,
As usual, I have lately found myself reading and thinking a lot on ways of seeing, viewing, and documenting in visual practice. Right now you may be like, Maddy, didn’t you literally just get your diploma, aren’t you done with having to think about stuff like that? Uh, yeah, you’d be right, but also the joke is on all of us because I can’t switch that part of my brain off even if I try. So, onward we sail with the whole ruminating-over-documentary-image-making and-consumption thing… Ahoy.
Anyway now that I’ve gotten that cringe moment out of my system (as well as that less-than-subtle humblebrag about graduation… don’t think I don’t know exactly what I did there, lol), let’s dig in.
I recently read Your Camera Roll Contains a Masterpiece: Our smartphones are stuffed with photos. The challenge is finding the good ones, by Michael Johnston for the New Yorker. I went into the article solely because I couldn’t not click on that title (see above re: the mobius loop that is my brain thinking about documentary). But given that it was written by Johnston, founder of legendary resource The Online Photographer, I shouldn’t have been surprised that it was actually a thoughtful and elegiac essay about the contemporary phone camera roll that runneth over.
Johnston isn’t making a sweeping criticism about the advent of camera phones; he’s not saying it’s the death of photography. He’s simply observing that this increased capacity for image-making, image storing, and image proliferating comes with many layers of nuance - good and bad. One such double-edged reality is that we no longer must mentally calculate the cost-per-frame of a roll of film, ration our shots accordingly, develop it into a contact sheet, go through the thumbnails to select the strongest image, and then manually develop that one winning photograph. The pros of the smartphone age obviously are increased savings, ease, efficiency, choice: all undeniably positive, democratising changes. But the other pro is that the more images you make, the better the statistical odds that one of them will be truly great. In other words: the bigger the haystack, the more needles. The con here is that as a result we are at risk of collectively losing our knack for culling or editing - which is, of course, what must be done in order to find that needle.
It’s here that the essay contains one of the most apt descriptions I’ve encountered of the process of self-editing/assessing/truly seeing your own photography work:
"‘Redacting takes time. You can’t edit pictures by thinking; you have to do it by looking. The more pictures you have, the more you have to look. Everyone’s different, but here’s how I worked back in the film days. Every other night, I’d develop three rolls of Kodak Tri-X film, standing at my kitchen sink. With a lighted magnifier, I would carefully examine the three contact sheets, each containing thirty-five frames. Looking at the miniature pictures, I knew the cost of each one to the cent. From them, I’d select maybe fifteen pictures, making eight-by-ten work prints of them. At first, I’d think they all showed the same promise. But then I’d pin them up on the wall for five days and look at them. Day by day, something mysterious would happen. Perhaps three of the pictures would pull me in further, with force, until I loved looking at them. The other twelve I’d never need to see again.’
Johnston’s primary thesis is that this process need not be exclusive to analogue photography (though many of us do continue to shoot film in large part because it mandates this level of seeing and whittling - which we recognise to be crucial to the craft). Rather, he argues that seeking out a strong photograph is contingent on the internal process of sitting with images to feel out how they resonate on an emotional register. ‘Looking,’ he says, ‘is about more than just noticing the visual qualities of a photograph. It’s also about giving yourself time to feel.’
We don’t always know what makes the rare photo so transcendent, striking, memorable, sublime. There are roadmaps to a ‘good’ photograph: in the composition, technical proficiency, unusual or visually arresting subject matter. But there’s also a special alchemy that elevates an image beyond the sum of its parts. It’s like love: we can talk about dopamine and oxytocin and trust and whatever else, distill it down to its scientific parts, but that only works in reverse as a way of understanding that which already is there, not as a way of building it from the ground up. It can’t be constructed purely from those elements. The final ingredient is the magic, and that falls to chance. Johnston compares photography to fishing, ‘a sport in which you can do a lot to optimise your chances but still can’t know for sure what you’re going to get. Chance is pretty much always in play. Sometimes everything comes together before the lens, and the visual world sorts itself within the frame, and you get a little gift. None of us really knows for sure if or when the magic’s going to happen.’
On film or on digital, on a bulky 4x5 view camera or an iPhone, on a $10,000 Leica or a drugstore disposable camera, this remains true. Whether we are able to find the magic in a camera roll, a contact sheet, or a batch of scanned negatives is up to each of us to try.
Lil tings:
Silicon Valley Founders Are Not the Protagonists of Reality: The fall of bloated tech start-ups isn’t tragic, regardless of what the recent spate of TV series would have you believe, by Malcolm Harris for The Nation. I’ll take ‘Thank God someone fucking said it’ for 200, Trebek.
Oldie but a goodie: The Writer as Influencer: Writers feel as much pressure to perform their identities online as they do to actually write, by Allegra Hobbs in Study Hall. Trust me on this one!
“I still have to remind myself all the time that it’s not actually helpful to hypothesize about how other people feel, or base my decisions off a constellation of unspoken factors.” A zinger of a line from Haley Nahman’s Maybe Baby newsletter this week on the fine line between self-care and avoidance.
This video:
Recent reading: The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh, which was excellent and on which I wrote last week’s newsletter for Where the Leaves Fall. Also The Pisces by Melissa Broder, which was quite possibly the most self-consciously weird and off-putting novel I’ve ever read and which I disliked IMMENSELY.
I watched The Lighthouse last night and it is an absolutely WACKED OUT DISTURBING film; also excellent (and beautifully shot).
Right, that’s all for me today. See you next time!
Maddy