Essay 5: “What we are looking at” vs. “What we are looking for”
3 A.M. Reveries
At three in the morning, when the spirit of Albert Einstein visits each and every one of us, and we can solve Fermat’s last equation but we are just too tired to get out of bed and find a notepad and pencil, I had a revelation. I am pretty sure that it was both profound and original. Unfortunately, I can’t remember it. But please don’t consider it immodest, individually or phylogenically, if I wish to celebrate this lost insight regardless. For me. For you. For us. For we depend on illusions or delusions of genius in order to make it through the mundane even if we are incapable of validating what it was that was so exceptional that occurred to us in the obscure hours of the morning.
I have some notions of what it was about and I am confident as to what it pertains to: photography. More so the choices one makes in terms of subject matter than the settings and one’s technical savoir faire. Quite the opposite. In fact, it was exactly about oppositeness that I had been thinking. But on the sub-atomic particulate level. Quantum oppositeness. Spinning poles, both North and South. It felt so wonderful to be ensconced in an armchair in a circle with the great thinker and his friends, laughing, puffing on a pipe, understanding. Of course, they get to recover their discoveries and enshrine them in equational eternity. The lesser we, or perhaps the lesser I, must make do with general misunderstandings of what it was all about.
So.
Most photographers take photos of things they want to see and that they think other people will want to see.
They may want to see those things for a variety of reasons: those things are nice to look at (Swiss Alps, flowers, smiling loved ones, etc.); those things might be necessary for a diagnosis (MRIs, X-Rays, etc.); those things might form a collective album of documentation of movement through space and time (one’s trip to France, the first time one scuba dives, a memorable meal on the piazza, getting married, etc.) I have eschewed product photography as a category because marketing as motivation somehow vitiates the artistry of the endeavor.
In most of the scenarios above, photographers want what they want. There is a direct, linear, non-swerving, fort-da correspondence of what they are looking at and what they are looking for. For example, if you are standing in front of the Matterhorn and it looks splendid with sun glinting from and glazing the snowy crevices and the whole craggy structure looking like it has been overcome or overdone by arrested waves of diamond-crusted frosting that is running into wide channels between trees below, finally fusing into paths that acquire width to become larger and larger avenues in a deltaic network that finally converge and overtake you at the level at which you are standing as one giant homage to fromage, to blancmange, to horizontality and Chantilly and eternity and the corpulent froth of the edge of time’s fat, white wave prior to a moment of total whiteout, you will most likely snap a photo. Of the Matterhorn. There in front of you. Lost, the transcendentalism of the moment.
Most photographers take photographs of things that they intend to take photographs of, and if they don’t, they consider those ancillary shots accidental. I wish to make an argument for making the ancillary intentional, advocating for adjacency, calling for a referendum on amateur and professional photographers alike: I’m interested in photographing all that is de-contextual, de-peaked, anti-acme, blurry, low, anonymous, inscrutable, mild, de-landmarked, Schopenhauer’s shoes without the shoes, Schrodinger’s cat without his cardboard pajamas’, portraits without people, pictures without a program, maps without features, birds without feathers flocking together: the ganzfeld without the need to conduct an experiment on anyone. I think it is in this interstice between or off-center from the obvious and the selected against that we might find one of the many infinities that await.
Lascaux, Niépce & Daguerre
This all started in France. Perhaps everything starts—or ends—in France. Maybe that is what Rick meant in that bar in Casablanca. Perhaps not. Photography had another famous start in France. A few imagistic starts, perhaps: Lascaux, Niépce & Daguerre is not the name of a law firm or hip café. Instead, it is three names of three famous image-origins. Since you can find their accurate biographies on your own, I will provide you with the highly fictionalized, unauthorized biographies of these three artists.
Lillith of Lascaux was a neanderthal or a Cro-Magnon woman who lived in France a long time ago and who loved rudimentary baguettes and croissants and was always burning different fruit-stones and nuts and grinding them and roasting them in an attempt to achieve the perfect morning beverage about 65,000 years ago. She invented a circular device that she observed would move of its own accord along declines. This, she called the wheel. With two working prototypes, she decided it would be nice to go uphill from time to time, so she invented and affixed rudimentary handlebars and a saddle and the first bicycle was invented in France. In a way, you could say she was the first winner of the Tour de France as well: she rode all over the landscape whilst the other cave people just grunted and jerked their thumbs at her, puzzled as to what could compel a person to invent things.
Someone stole her bike. Who could it be? She needed a way to communicate what had happened in abstentia of her being the one doing the communicating and for all eternity, for she wanted to warn the world of thievery. She was morally minded. She needed a way to “leave” information at “the scene of the crime” and in other locations so that someone with information could help her recover her prototype. To do this, she invented ink and painting and pictographs and, in a way, symbolic representation which led to language. Foucault and Derrida are merely carrying on the work of Lillith. The earliest cave paintings in France are actually of a missing bicycle with the words, “Man-kay” and a drawing of a bee and a large letter “C” and then a person “letting” himself into a house by opening a door. Of course, houses hadn’t been invented yet. Nor had doors. So it might have been too much of a cognitive leap for this sound-and-symbol puzzle—a rebus—to be decoded.
Unfortunately, her bicycle was never recovered until recently. It turns out a corrupt lineage of technologists have been studying it for 65,000 years, stealing one technological patent from it after another in a form of creative graft that one can only shake one’s head at and then hang one’s head in shame at what we became capable of. And, perhaps worse, Thag and some other cavemen decided cave women shouldn’t be allowed to invent anymore or to paint or use language, so they covered her images up with hand prints and scenes of men hunting animals with their spears. Suffice it to say feminism would have to wait for a long time to reclaim some of these early and promising moments in the history of the human race.
Niépce, or Niko to his friends, was an attic scientist of the first class. He too loved a hot beverage in the beginning of the day and really wished he could connect with some like-minded individuals whilst sipping said brew so he petitioned the mayor to create little shelters along the road where people called baristas might keep such beverages warm and waiting for people Niko called customers—and he suggested a few small round tables in front of these establishments with cane-backed and wicker-bottomed chairs and maybe a madeleine for the morning mingling.
Did a Swan go this Way?
He lost himself in a reverie on the madeleine and what it meant to him—the mayor, a person named Proust, was keenly aware of the value of literary reverie and begged Niko to remember other things he might have experienced, memories of things past, encouraging him to drift backwards through time like a swan on a foggy river—Proust was an accidental hypnotizer and as such was in close partnership with all that was peripheral to his life and penned prolifically. Entrepreneurial as well, Proust decided to collaborate with Niko on the hot-beverage-selling-establishment and together they opened the world’s first café, in Paris, and then he opened dozens more and then hundreds and then sold the enterprise to a business man in a cloak named Astral Joachimsthaler. Niko was thrilled to be freed from all these business partnerships and sought refuge in a sojourn of solace in his attic for a month with his chemicals. He was a chemistry teacher. And then it occurred to him as he looked at the light as it effortlessly transited through the glass of his one window and made shadows on the opposite wall that he could chemically register this difference through time and heat, and he might be able to inscribe his view onto something capable of time travel, more stable than just seeing was and then having to narrate what one has seen. Others could see what had been seen by others. Two people could share the same perspective—impossible in the physics of the day. And two people could share the same moment in time. This conflationary theory of collapsing all time and space into a single perspective or an infinite album of such perspectives The all-perspective, he thought, would unify people in peace and kindness. He shared his thoughts downstairs at one of his cafes. He was unaware that an unscrupulous industrial spy was lurking in the shadows, not paying for drinks but just listening. Unfortunately, this spy recognized the commercial potential of storing images on paper. He stole the idea and began making small metal boxes to capture light.
Another imaginative type, Daguerre, had a terrible memory about what people’s faces looked like. And he realized that he clicked with certain people but other just weren’t his type, his Daguerreotype. Well, he decided that was what must be done. So he, too, locked himself in an attic with chemicals and he, too, discovered a way of taking photographs and he wrote some code for a large loom he had been secretly developing in an abandoned warehouse along the river and was soon able to go from photo to woven tapestry and thus he could chronicle in one long ribbon his search for true connection. (As you have realized, it is a very French thing to lock oneself in an attic and create technology.) He didn’t think the little pieces of metal would serve him long enough because his eyes were failing and he preferred the large-format of the tapestry, which he called his interior network or his wide as the world web…his internet or www for short…in time, the loom began weaving on its own, out of some kind of mechanical momentum, and artificially created phantom faces. But Daguerre did not demur, and realized he could communicate with his loom, a machine that could produce information or an engine that could find things for him, and he lovingly called his loom a search engine and as such he happily searched.
The principle of ex-centric photography
I may have drifted a bit from my original attempt to describe the insights that came to me early in the morning and how they related to an intentional commitment to off-angle photography. I digress. Ironically, one might even say that digression in this thought-piece is humorously a demonstration of the principle of ex-centric photography I am espousing. And in the meantime, another idea came inchoate and half-baked, illuminating the fog of early morning transitional and transcendental consciousness…it occurred to me that early on, we invested so much in recreating the systems of the body: transportation, with her rues and boulevards, is our circulatory system; postal systems everywhere move information, like our nervous systems. And now, we may have crossed the Newtonian threshold (and Rubicon?) in that we no longer move static notices through physical space, but instead, we have artificial intelligence proper, which synthesizes and creates information and moves it to us…isn’t the origination of information the stuff of consciousness? That undiscovered country…is it not really a terra-cognitiva, a soil that can propagate its own seeds…a seat of information? Have we not come to this, by virtue of our early chemical accidents with shadows on the backs of cabinets and our Jacquardian joking that now looms so large in our symbolic and literary landscapes? We may have hoisted ourselves with our own petards…now, what shall we do about it? Might we do the Wright thing, take inspiration from Icarus, heed the warnings of Prometheus and Pythagoras…might we somehow still surf along the waves of our accomplishments and the splendor of the natural world? Or is it getting too big, that wave…is it a tsunami? Is it a complex pool of tidal chop and cross-chop? What kind of surfing will we be capable of…what kind of flight? Might we split? We split? We split? Must we tether ourselves to our masts as the sirens of technology sing to us? The ethos of kaleidoscope…that creative urge to put all into a fugue and marvel at what comes out…that might be something we will more and more find ourselves sharing. Will we be good at sharing? I think we might not like it at first…but I think we may need to learn to share. And, perhaps, we may be surprised with unexpected dividends of greatness we can’t even imagine.
*By the way, Lillith Lascaux’s bicycle is still missing.