Figure 1 – Photographer of Oscar Grossheim, in his Muscatine, Iowa studio around 1910. From the Wikimedia Commons. Original image from the Musser Library and in the public domain.

We recently discussed the statement that “I never look good in pictures.”  There is an implicit viewpoint in that statement, namely that somehow the camera is conspiring against you, that the camera has a mind of its own and a rather devilish one at that.

Early cameras were huge cumbersome things.  Consider for instance the monstrous camera in Figure 1 which shows Oscar Grossheim in his Muscatine, Iowa studio around 1910.  In an age of scientific emergence the camera was a marvel indeed, and it is not difficult to imagine that it somehow seemed to have a life of its own, and ominously one that captured souls.

At first the camera was seen as a machine that in an instant produced a perfect portrait of a person or image of a scene.  But soon it was realized that the camera often caught details that the eyes would miss – that it was capable of shifting the mental focus of an image.  This meant that the camera, really the photographer, was capable  of creating an interpretive image.  Arguably the photographer unlike the painter was constrained by the physical world.  There were physical laws that could not be violated.  I would suggest however, that all artistic media possess restraints.  It is just that those of the camera are different than those of oil paints or acrylics, marble or bronze.

Still, sitting for a painter was quite a different story and experience than surrendering your soul to that mechano-optical box that feigned indifference.  And the box was omnipresent well into the twentieth century.  You had to deliberately carry it along when you wanted to capture life’s moments. You had to load it with the magic film.  You had to take it out of its case.  You had to focus it.

In the twenty-first century all of this deliberateness is gone.  We always carry cameras with us as part of our cell phone “communicators.”  They are there to photograph, to transmit, and to share. But we don’t think about it.  We just point and snap even take “selfies” with the Pope. The camera has lost its personal identity.  It has become part of us.

The paradox here is that modern cameras, unlike the cameras of the last century, truly have their own brains and identities.  Typically you’re not responsible for the beautiful image; the camera is. This is truly become what Ray Kurzweil has called “The Age of Spiritual Machines,” where your camera or cell phone might actually think.  But our sense of cameras is different.  They are silent partners now, their presence goes almost unnoticed and as a result we no longer fear them as “soul catchers.”  Perhaps they have already stolen them.

As promised, today I’d like to discuss the paradoxical question of whether we take photographs to chronicle our lives or whether we live our lives to take photographs?  Put in a simpler fashion, the question of the day is why do we take photographs?

It seems trivial to say that photography revolutionized the world and our view of it.  It was invented at a time of great discovery and it was immediately employed to chronicle these discoveries.  Of course, this quickly meant “ante up.”  Early photography was cumbersome; so it is not surprising that adoption was slow.  Most of the great geographical discoveries of the mid-nineteenth century, for instance the discovery of the Source of the Nile, went unphotographed.  But, by the time of the early twentieth century expeditions to the arctic and antarctic it was expected that a camera would chronicle the event.  This is just as we later expected a camera to chronicle the first ascent of Mount Everest and the first footstep on the moon.  Ubiquitous to all of these events was the fundamental difficulty of taking the photograph.

In the nineteenth century the grand tour became both popular and an essential element of a young sophisticate’s education.  This represented the individual’s journey of exploration.  You wanted a record of your journeys.  You might even have seen yourself in some small way an explorer. After all, we are all legends in our own minds. To chronicle their travels they brought back pictures and artefactual. The purchase of paintings soon gave way to the purchase of photographs, photogravures, and post cards.  With George Eastman’s simplification of photography and the photographic process people began to chronicle their travels and the events of their lives with photographs.

It is easy to make the argument that Eastman’s inventions led to a great wave of photographic mediocrity.  I think that the case for this is strong.  However, I did recently read how people are now collecting these early random photographs of other peoples lives.  So in that sense it has become art, or at least of historical significance.

There is the argument that Kodak started a process whereby the purpose of travel became not to travel, see, and learn, with photography retaining precious memories, but to photograph.  The chronicle became the purpose.  There is evidence to support this. Kodak would mark the sites at scenic overlooks, for instance, where pictures should be taken. Sitting through Uncle Harry’s slides became an oft experienced chore.  People no longer went, like Victorians, to Africa to shoot big game with a gun, they now went and go to shoot big game with a camera.  I once remember visiting the Uffizzi Gallery in Florence.  The only other people there were a family of Japanese tourists, who scurried about following a preplanned itinerary and paused for ever so short a moment to snap their portraits standing before a well-known work of art.  Their game was pretty obvious.

Of course, with the coming of digital photography and subsequently IPhones and social media, it all became a pretty trivial pursuit.  As the camera became and continues to become smaller and smaller, it ceases to be an entity unto itself. Essentially everyone has a camera all of the time.  They’ve become part of us.  These cameras are remarkable in their ability to conquer all technical adversity except mediocrity of vision and poor composition. Everything is photographed and all experience is instantly shared.

While there may still be a significant segment of the population that is using their cameras or cell phones as electronic score cards; and while there are still those who pursue the latest camera or the largest lens as some sort of phallic symbol of richness; I have to argue, as I have before, that connectivity is good.  People take pictures and upload them for friends to see as a means of connecting and sharing with these friends.  Human experience shared is human experience enriched.  Someday people may collect our digital personal records. Don’t assume that they will all be lost or that they will be deemed worthless. And at that moment we will have achieved the same miracle that those who recorded their lives on film achieved.  That is communication across time and generations – that is communication of real lives lived, experienced, and recorded.

Figure 1 – SuzyR hiking above the Yosemite Valley, (c) SR 2013 and reproduced with permission.

For American photographers, the Yosemite Valley and Half Dome, in particular, are defining.  So you can imagine my excitement when my colleague, Hati and Skoll

Figure 2 – SuzyR climbing the cables up Half Dome, (c) SR 2013 and reproduced with permission.

reader, and regular commenter SuzyR announced her intention to climb the cable line up half dome.  I begged her to share some of her images with us, which she has graciously agreed to do.

To begin with we have, in Figure 1, SuzyR laden down with a full backpack climbing above the Yosemite Valley. Then we have, in Figure 2, SuzyR gracefully scrambling up the cable line to the summit. I, personally, am very impressed, because I  hasten to point out, that all of this is occurring at about ten thousand feet above sea level.  The mere thought makes me dizzy!  However, my awe at SuzyR’s achievement is clearly not shared by the squirrel in Figure 3, who clearly thinks that they’re all nuts!

As beautiful as Suzy’s pictures are, I do not post them merely to record her achievement.  Rather, I wish to use them to segue into the topic of tomorrow’s blog: this is the paradoxical question of whether we take photographs to chronicle our lives or whether we live our lives to take photographs?

Figure 3 – Apathetic squirrel above the Yosemite Valley, (c) SR 2013 and reproduced with permission.

Figure 1 – Union soldier photographed upon his release from the Confederate POW camp, Andersonville Prison, in May of 1865. Image from the Library of Congress and in the public domain.

It seems appropriate to talk about horrible images on September 11.  Even if you are not a regular reader of the Hati and Skoll blog, it is almost for certain that you’ve seen a lot of terrible images this past year.  Unless you only click on links to cute animal and adorable baby pictures you’ve seen them on the web, in newspapers, in magazines, and, of course, on television.  Terrible images are everywhere, and they are meant to tug on your heart-strings, to move you to rage, and to motivate you to action.  This is ultimately the purpose of photojournalism.  Indeed, it is meant to be the highest achievement of the inanimate object that we call “camera” to connect people with their inner humanity to to bring forth empathy.

So we may recall the chain of events that is the history of photography: the Crimean War, the American Civil War, the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the Korean War, The Vietnam War, The First Iraq War, the Second Iraq War, the War in Afghanistan.    I have taken a wholly America-centric, view; but I’m sure that you get the point.   It is relentless and it hurts too much to list all the sites and scenes of children killed and dying.  The fact is that while photographs of terrible events continue to move us, they possess the ability to make the terrible commonplace, to harden and and make us, dare I say it, indifferent.  Photography in its relentless ability to move us ultimately possesses the ability to make us apathetic.

Ultimately, it is a psychological defense mechanism.  This mechanism is described ever so brilliantly by Susan Sontag in her book “On Photography:”

“Photographs shock in so far as they show something novel.  Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised – partly through the very proliferation of such images of horror.  One’s first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation: a negative epiphany.  For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau which I came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July 1945.  Nothing I have seen – in photographs or real life – ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously … When I looked at those photographs, something broke.  Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably, grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying.”

If you take a rubber band or a spring and stretch it, it pulls back when you release it.  However, pull it too far, beyond what is referred to as its elastic limit, and it will never return, never be its former self.  What Sontag describes is the mind reaching the elastic limit of what it can psychologically take or accept and then becoming irrevocably wounded, stretched beyond its elastic limit.

Years ago I went to see Ingmar Bergman‘s “Cries and Whispers.”  This is a tightly allegorical film, flawed, I think in many ways.  But, worst of all, at one point in the film there is this terrible scene of self violation – I won’t go into details.  But the point is that you couldn’t accept it and you were instantly pulled out of the film, suddenly became instead an observer of the people fleeing the theater.    The elastic limit had been reached, the effectiveness of the film lost.  Of course, the bar can always be raised we’ve got the Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino to keep raising it.

But the point is that the ability of photojournalism to shock is a double-edged sword that shocks and hardens us at the same time.  As Sontag relates, the ante needs always to be raised.

Have you ever heard the statement that: “I never look good in photographs.” If I’ve heard it once, I think that I have heard it a thousand times.  And the statement belies the dichotomy of how we view the camera and photography.  The camera is at once the ever trustworthy arbiter of truth and the never to be trusted purveyor of falsehood.  With the invention of photography in the late 1830’s you suddenly had a box that could in seconds capture the stark reality of a moment.  But with the invention of the calotype and subsequently the wet and dry glass plate processes, where negatives could be copied and modified at will, came the notion that somehow this box could not really be trusted.  And of course, with digital photography came the realization that all “reality” could be modified.  It is the world of the “Matrix,” where our senses can no longer be trusted. Indeed, it is not coincidental that the ascendance of Adobe PhotoShop is concurrent with the Matrix movies.

This ambiguity, as to what a photograph is, is what your friend is appealing to with the statement that “I never look good in photographs.”  But there is, I believe, more going on.  First, on a physiological level when we see people, we typically do not see them frozen in time.  Unmoving people tend to be dead people and there is nothing vibrant and vital about dead people.  They are not quite themselves visually. This is because living people are constantly and subtly in motion, especially their eyes.  This is wholly lacking in a photograph – witness your friend who has the uncanny ability to shut his eyes at the instant that you press the shutter.   In a real sense the camera has killed them, created a microdeath. Second, but still on a physiological level, when we see and more importantly recognize a person, we are keying in on certain features that composite mean to us, “that’s my friend Peggy Sue.”  How well does this three dimensional perception translate to our perception of the compressed two dimensional  image in the photograph?  Also Peggy Sue may be self-conscious of the little space between her front teeth.  She is forever covering her mouth with her hand.  The camera has frozen her face in 1/160^th of a second.  You may not notice them at all, or better still may consider them an adorable element of the composite that you call Peggy Sue.  But to Peggy Sue herself this space has now become a looming glacial crevasse. She conceives that her ugliness is revealed to the world.  Which takes us to the third problem, that Peggy Sue has an image of herself, which is a lot less forgiving than the one your loving eyes see.  In fact, she is fully aware of all of her flaws, and the camera really puts it in her face.

With the exception of stars, starlets, and fashion models, who live in a very unreal world, where it is acceptable, in the pursuit of elusive beauty, to place Oprah Winfrey’s head on Ann Margaret’s body, the rest of us must deal with what we are given.  We chide the camera for its faults and subject ourselves to digital dermabrasions and facelifts in Adobe Photoshop.  Always in the back of our minds is the fact that the camera really isn’t lying.  That 1/160^th of a second of our lives is really one of a sequence of 1/160ths of a second that tell our stories.  Indeed, there have been some marvelous photoessays that do just that.  A wonderful example is Nicholas Nixon’s “The Brown Sisters,” which is a series of annually taken photographs of these women starting in 1975.    Visually, features, now despite their metamorphoses, become the glue that binds the images together.  The camera is not capturing the triumph of time, but rather the victory of the constancy of the human spirit and the glory of maturity.

* “I pull in resolution, and begin
To doubt the equivocation of the fiend
That lies like truth…”

William Shakespeare “Macbeth“