John Austin Photography

PHOTO IN C21

PREFACE

We are in a photographic tsunami, so time for a general, but very quick, overview. 

This brief text is an attempt to codify my late career thoughts about photography in C21.  It is divided into five parts, firstly my personal continuation with Modernist straight photography in a period of increasing confusion and obfuscation, then a brief description of Postmodernist photography, following this a critique of the continuing attempts to make photography become Art, fourthly the state of photography on the Wise and Wonderful Web and finally photography’s environmental and social obligations in C21.  Then a briefest look at the snapshot. I repeat, what follows are my personal views.

A number of writers and photographers are mentioned in the text, but are not described.  It is up to the reader to look them up for further investigation.

I describe myself as photographer, not an artist.

 

1: SUDDEN CLARITY

And, as a photographer, a background to my seeing: the first time I saw a clear edge was at the age of about seven.  ‘Till then everything was a blur, ‘cept I did not know what a blur was.  At school the teacher would scrawl meaningless blobs on a blackboard and I would copy them as meaningless glyphs of my own devise, which the teacher would then hold up for class ridicule.  So I was taken to a school psychologist for being being terminally stupid.  (This is not something I deny.). The county school psychologist took one look at me and asked if I had ever had my eyes tested.

Revelation: the first time in my life I ever saw a clear edge was through a phoropter.  Since that moment I have loved phoropters and detested school teachers for their universal stupidity, arrogance and cruelty, an observation that has not changed in the last 73 years.

From that moment I was enthralled with seeing, with magnifying lenses, microscopes and eventually cameras.  It was this seeing that led me to Modernist straight photography as the vehicle to show my world with the greatest possible clarity.

 

2.0: OVERVIEW OF THE ISMS

2.1: C21 MODERNISM & PHOTOGRAPHIC INDEXICALITY

Sesshu

After years in China
emptiness achieved
he painted
with the fewest of strokes
the hardness of rocks
the twistedness of roots

Kenneth White
1936 - 2023

I first read this poem in 1971 and it has motivated my practice ever since.

Modernist ‘straight’ photography was a revolt in the name of clarity against the fuzzy brown romanticisation of photography by the previous C19 Pictorialist school.  But we must not forget the work of Benjamin Stone, Frederik Evans and Peter H Emerson in England and Eugene Atget in Paris, who tried to record their world with as much veracity as they could.

Francis Bacon:

The contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention.

Attributed to Francis Bacon
1561 - 1626

At its root, a photograph is a visual document of an event.  Photo-documents are not only those made with a small hand held camera, photographs made with long exposure by moonlight, or made with large format view camera are also photo-documents.

One strength of photography is its ability to hold a moment of time in stillness for longer consideration.  The additional strengths of Modernist straight photography was its clarity, directness and indexicality.  This applies to both personal and documentary modernist photography.

In addition to striving for objectivity, photo-documentation uses aesthetic and compositional clarity to enable the viewer to easily read the content - exactly like the use of syntax in writing.  While making reading easy, overuse of compositional norms becomes tedious.  Also, the use of compositional norms for clarity is two edged.  The second edge is the tendency of photography to aestheticise that which is being depicted, which has its roots in our Eurocentric colonialist viewpoint.

Reading the content of a picture is one thing, real understanding of this content is another, which requires intelligent and educated viewing on the part of the viewer.

Despite the obvious limitations of Modernist straight photography I continue to use it as it best serves my need to show, in the clearest, the current destruction and defence of the environment.

No image is ever perfect, but an imperfection can act as a Barthesian punctum to prick and liven the viewing of a picture.  As Francis Bacon said:

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

Francis Bacon
1561 - 1626

 

2.2: POST [scrip to] MODERNISM 

By the 1970s Modernist straight photography had reduced itself to stylistic mannerism.  One answer to this was Postmodernism, which has attempted to loosen this restriction by emphasising photography’s conceptualist aspects and re-introducing elements of surrealism and romanticism.

POSTMODERNIST FIGURATION:  Staged or figural photographs have been with us since Victorian times, the embarrassing work of HP Robinson and OG Reijlander prefigured current large scale workers like Gregory Crewdson.  Crewdson directed a large production and lighting crew to construct his images.  These are composed of scans from multiple 10x8” negatives for the final output of a huge digital print.  Jeff Wall works in a similar vein.  On a smaller scale are Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Cindy Sherman, USA and in Australia Anne Zahalka, Bill Henson and Tracey Moffatt.  These tableaux ignore the immediacy and engagement that photography is capable of.

Some perceptive and engaged Postmodernist imagery is being done with mobile ‘phones by Paola Anselmi and others.  Their work invites the viewer to re-examine the way of photographic imagery can describe the urban landscape.

However, most Postmodernism is too conceptually clever or aesthetically derivative to have long term relevance.

Apart from this very brief overview, Postmodernism is beyond the scope of this text.

 

2.3: NEO-PICTORIALISM - “FINE ART” PHOTOGRAPHY

As John Roberts has pointed out in 2014:

If a photograph has directness and strength it does not need to be called Art to secure its cultural identity.

John Roberts 2014

Photographic Artist and Fine Art Photography are terms that trouble me.  The motivation of Neo-Pictorialists, like that of Postmodernist photographers, stems from a need to throw off the tightening limitations of Modernism.  But they attempt this by returning photography to brown and blurry C19 Pictorialism.

In a repetition of nineteenth century photographers feelings of visual inadequacy many current photographers are adopting wet plate, pinhole, cyanotype and other “alternative” photographic methods in attempts to create Art.

However, in distinct contrast to the self-conscious photo-artists, there are a lot of people around the world who use turmeric and cyanotype printing and pinhole photography as a fun based community activity, as we do in Quinni Arts and St Paul’s Community Darkroom.  This use can have a great community bonding effect, as in Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day.  These workers just want to play and have fun, and laugh when when their results are totally different to what they planned.

Ultimately, a photograph stands or falls by its ontological strength, and no amount of Petzval lens swirlies or strange printing will raise a dead image.

 

3: PHOTOGRAPHY IN C21

3.1 DIGITAL DEMENTIA

We live in a post-photographic world dominated by cameras.

Post-photographic meaning that photography is no longer a separate practice observing the flow of life, but has become integral with our life.  Dominated meaning camera-phones and surveillance cameras are everywhere.

This section might read as though I am against digital photography.  I am not, I use digital media extensively in my work, along with traditional silver gelatine photography, but I use them as appropriate, based on the intended use of the images.

The introduction of the small, practical, fully digital cameras from Fuji and later Sony was over thirty five years ago.  These cameras offered technical freedom and a democratisation of photography.  The introduction of the Kyocera camera-‘phone in 1999 accelerated this trend.

Camera-phones have enabled the making of billions of images of everything - remember the plethora of sourdough loaves boasted on the interwebs during Covid-19.  Worse is people around a scene of a car crash using their camera-phones instead of doing something useful.  This criticism does not apply to situations like Ukraine, the Sahel, Palestine or covertly in Iran, where camera-phones are used to report to the world, not that the world really cares.

However, I do feel it is necessary to be aware of digital photography’s dangers.  The faults are not with digital cameras, but the misuse of images.

IMAGE MANIPULATION

One problem is the widespread misuse of programmes like Photoshop.  With Photoshop’s editing facilities, falsification of images has became normal  This misuse has led to one of the differences between silver halide photography and digital photography being the ability of the former to possess demonstrable indexicality as opposed to the likelihood of a digital image having been manipulated into a fiction.  For example, the oversaturated pictures of recent Aurora Australis events.

This has been amplified since the introduction of cheap and available AI programmes.  AI images can already look frighteningly real, to the extent the 2022 Sony World Photography Award was won by Boris Eldagsen with an image generated by AI.  Having made his point, Elgadsen rejected the prize.  This ability to falsify or assemble fake images has expanded by many orders of magnitude in the past two years to the point where deep fake videos are possible with a home laptop.

In the days of black and white, making a photograph was a considered activity, for me the making of photographs still is, and ‘though I constantly carry a 1940s Leica for the Snapshots portfolios I only use it when something special is in front of me.  I treat digital photography in the same way.

Of course, a digital image can remain un-manipulated, just as a film image can be scanned and modified.  To repeat, the faults are not with digital cameras, but the misuse of images.

On a positive note, Photoshop has finally ended the myth of a photograph’s veracity.

SOCIAL MEDIA

The other problem happens when an image is made public on a social media platform

As Susan Sontag stated:

The meaning of an image is ultimately determined by whoever controls its distribution.

The current image plethora, granted by the universality of camera-phones, was annexed early in this century by social media channels behind an outwardly benign mask.  Outwardly benign because once an image is on the interwebs there is no control over theft and misuse and the worse abuse occurs from the owners of these platforms.  In the almost twenty five years of this century social media hegemony has become universal.  However, to turn one’s back on it is to risk social isolation.

The dangers are rapidly growing, with AI facial recognition programmes used by totalitarian governments and by capitalist information resource companies, people identified, named and stored from social media images can be tracked via the increasing use of facial recognition cameras on every street corner and in every bank, airport and taxi.  It infuriates me that people continue to load pictures of their friends and family to Facebook and Instagram without consideration for anything other than a few quick “likes”.

Paraphrased from Susan Sontag 1977

A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. . .  And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit the natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make [everlasting] war, give jobs to bureaucrats [and total control over Earth’s population for profit].

That was forty seven years ago.

Control of the population for corporate profit is expanding at the very time we are facing total environmental and societal collapse, literally profit before life.

In 1949, when George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty Four I doubt he imagined that not only would we accept constant location and camera surveillance, but that we would gleefully buy the machines ourselves from our own money.  Just because we can make an image public does not mean we have to, keeping images for private and family use is wholly valid.

Even seemingly passive items like a self propelled vacuum cleaner with a camera, specifically the Ecovacs Deebot X2, is easily hacked, so if you have a quicky on the kitchen table, hackers in China will instantly watch and share the recording on Weibo or TikTok.  This is true!

Regarding private photographs, John Berger has stated

. . . For the photographer this means thinking of her or himself not so much as a reporter to the rest of the world but, rather, as a recorder for those involved in the events photographed.  The distinction is crucial.

John Berger, Uses of Photography, 1978

Since the creation of the Wise and Wonderful Web the division between private and public has become vestigial.  Therefore, in allowing us to record their trace, the people we photograph are placing great trust in us, a trust we must respect.

CHIMPING

A practical aspect of digital photography that annoys me is the habit of Chimping, where some digiographers turn from the subject to look at the play-back function on a camera.  Called Chimping because of the "Oooh Oooh Oooh" sounds they make. Apart from self praise, this practice shows a lack of confidence and ability, and when working with people it rudely breaks the subject-photographer engagement.  Learn to know what you are doing and trust your technique and equipment so that this crucial engagement is maintained.

With film there was no way to check an image ‘till the film was processed.  Traditional silver based photography still has validity in areas where its use is worth the time, skill and effort needed.  And a darkroom is a very peaceful place compared to the demented clutter of a computer screen.

 

5:FUTURE USE I: Die Kamer sie waffen im der Klassenkampf

Die Kamer sie waffen im der Klassenkampf
The camera is a weapon in the class struggle.

Slogan from the German Workers Photography Movement,
from 1924 to its sudden ending in 1933.

Before looking at the future, and regarding the colonial viewpoint alluded to earlier, it is difficult to be objective in Australian photography as our practice derives from our visual learning originating from European traditions.  The currently popular idealised colour landscape photography printed on canvas and our ethnographic depiction of the First Australians are evidence of this.  We need to learn to grow out of our Eurocentric visual constraint.

For landscape, my approach has been to slow down, learn to walk quietly through this land and to stop where I feel a resonance.  Let the land and the light open up, then quietly photograph what is offered.  If this land has been damaged by forestry, mining or farming, photograph what is there, especially in areas to be further degraded for lifestyle mineral extraction.

Most photography of Australia’s First People still bears the hierarchical taint of C20 ethnography.  One answer is to equip, encourage and empower First Peoples with tools to write and photograph their own stories.  Or, as my friend Julian Bowron has suggested, just get out of the way and let them develop their own voice.

In Photography and Its Violations, 2014, John Roberts suggests that our documentation should point to, should question and should violate the veils of secrecy shrouding totalitarian states and international capitalism, which are sort of the same thing, to make us question, debate and reject what is happening around and to us.  Unfortunately, this un-veiling is almost impossible as international capitalism expertly observes without being observed and prevents any questioning of itself.  There is no way any of us are going to get into Putin’s Palace, Hancock’s Homestead or Murdoch’s Mansion, so we must work with the results of their greed.  The agenda of corporate and state secrecy is why so many journalists are being murdered in occupied Palestine and West Papua and by other repressive governments around the world.

Despite the almost total capitalist annexation of media, it remains the duty of researchers, writers, photographers and other recorders to work together to attempt this.  Skilled researchers are key figures as they are the unseen delvers who mine seams of obfuscation for the nugget of fact at the end of the tunnel.  I consider myself fortunate to have two among my friends.

 

SNAPSHOTS: The Pinacle of Photography.

Ending on a bright note, the personal snapshot, from C19 to now is, from my aged viewpoint, perhaps the most valid and interesting area of photography.  Without need to environmentally, sociologically or politically witness, or to have pretence to art, the best snapshots are some of the most ontologically engaged images we have.

Within snapshot I am including the whole spectrum from Edwardian snapshot to the new “Impossible Project - Polaroid Now” and “Lomography” phenomena.

There was, of course, an attempt to drag the snapshot into the art-sphere for commercial exploitation, but thankfully this seems to have failed.  Some theoreticians consider the snapshot as an intentional revolt against the major movements within photography, but I feel this is intellectual over-reach.

I personally enjoy the snapshot as vehicle for notes and for celebrating the commonplace, with no political agenda and ignoring the theoretical crap occasionally thrown at it.

Beyond this, the snapshot is a field that deserves consideration, consideration that is a celebration rather than a critique.

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Acknowledgements:  This essay is informed by writings by Ariella Azouley, Roland Barthes, John Berger, John Roberts and Susan Sontag.

Header image is a snapshot by Rev. John Joseph Strutt-Bird, photographically active 1896 - 1907

www references:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-04/robot-vacuum-hacked-photos-camera-audio/104414020
https://www.lomography.com/

 

© John Austin
Quinninup, 2024.08.17