The Online Photographer

One more post about this (to those of you waiting for me to move on*). I confess it's probably more useful for younger, newer photographers...who aren't reading this. But oh well.

The A.S. and the wall placard
I said the other day that "an idea is any intellectual notion that facilitates and motivates working," and Gary Nylander very sensibly brought up the topic of the artist's statement. I'll abbreviate it "AS" for this post, although that's not a standard abbreviation, so don't use it in the outside world and expect it to be understood. To the AS I would conjoin the "wall placard," those often exquisite orchids of text that are put on cards and sprinkled amongst the pictures at an exhibition. The AS is more closely related to the wall placard than it is to a working-process idea.

I take a somewhat jaundiced view of artist's statements, that woeful sub-category of compulsive literature cheerfully lampooned by the phenomenon of the "artspeak generator" and IAD, international artist dialect, but I love wall placards, usually the responsibility of the curator of the show you're looking at. Szarkowski used to write some of the wall placards for MoMA shows, can you imagine? That's a bit like Édouard Manet drawing New Yorker cartoons. I wonder if those were properly cherished and preserved. (Why do we still not have a collected writings of John Szarkowski? That's a scandal.) Many times, the wall placards are plucked from the exhibition catalog, and are preserved in that manner. Wall placards give added information about the work, from a more objective and more professional perspective, and their presence ranges from neutral to positive, in my opinion, as a component of museum shows; they never detract, as you can ignore them if you wish. Most museumgoers ignore them, I feel like. But my heart sinks a little if I look around a gallery room and see no wall placards. (Some of which are painted right on the wall itself. How do they do that?)

So, are the working idea and the artist's statement the same thing? No. The AS is usually a back-formation, created to justify the work after the work exists. They're meant to imply that the work is deeper than it looks and also that the work lives up to the artist's intent. They also are probably meant to signal [verb] that, if the viewer might not like the work, then the viewer might not understand the work.

My signal [adjective, meaning "striking in extent, seriousness, or importance"] example came from a group show I saw many years ago. One participant had photographed...bramble. Tangled branches of bushes with no foliage. The tangled, twisted, interlaced stems filled the frame and showed no surrounding context. Some from a little closer up, some from farther away, some in hard sunlight, some in soft overcast; and so forth. So they're just pictures of bushes. It wasn't enough of an idea for one picture, much less twenty-two or whatever. But the fellow had constructed the most elaborate and convincing apologia for what he had contrived to do that I couldn't help but admire the chutzpah. It was so clever, so compelling, so convincing, so insistent, that it made me see the bramble photos in a more sympathetic light...for a while. Then I went back to the more clearheaded reaction that the fellow had had no clue what to make pictures of.

Which gets us back to the idea of the idea. (Sorry. I've known that was coming.) An idea is any intellectual notion that facilitates and motivates working, but here's the thing about the idea as the framework, the "bones," of a project, theme or mission: the quality (subtlety, erudition, nicety) of the idea often doesn't have a direct correspondence to how well it will work. A dumb idea can lead to great pictures and ongoing growth, and brilliant-sounding ideas can lead to dull pictures or dead ends. Many times over the years I've questioned photographers about what they were up to, and often they give simple, unsatisfactory answers. One's crest falls. Ideas are not always good. Or smart, articulate, or well-conceived. Academic people have the most trouble with this, because they're trained to work with ideas and they're well aware of the beauty ideas can have; and they're afraid of stupid ideas—having long since learned the trick, crucial in academia, of not looking stupid. They will often construct beautiful, intricate, dazzling ideas...and then, from it, create bad, weak work that trails along behind like an unwilling child.

Because here's the thing: you can't evaluate a working idea for art by the usual standards. An idea is good if it facilitates and motivates working, so that's how you have to evaluate it. I mentioned William Wegman the other day. What was his idea? Presumably it was something like, "I'm going to make a portrait of my Weimaraner dog." On its face, that sounds like the dumbest damned idea for a photographic project anyone's ever heard. But it has literally inspired a lifetime of work, and that work has earned acclaim, renown, remuneration, and Guggenheim Fellowships. He's been endlessly creative in thinking up new ways to make pictures with the dogs in them. It was therefore not a dumb idea. It was a fantastic idea. It hasn't even been copied: Weimaraners belong to Wegman. It has proven infinitely flexible, consistently enabling, and unaccountably rich. But will "I got bored and started taking pictures of my Weimaraner with a hat or a tie on" do, at all, as an AS? Of course not. For that we need something a good deal more highflown.

August Sander, Pastry Chef (l.), Bricklayer (r.)

Or take August Sander. His idea was to make an extended typology of the German people during the interwar period, the period of the German Republic—as if people were defined by their work and "types" gravitated to specific work. According to a page at Tate Modern, "He believed that, through photography, he could reveal the characteristic traits of people. He used these images to tell each person's story; their profession, politics, social situation and background." Again, kind of a blunt, even misguided idea. Photographs do not actually tell all those things. But it launched him into working at portraiture, to looking for his "types" and examples of his categories, and set him to roving far outside his normal circles for subjects; with the result that he created one of the great bodies of work in the history of photography. Although the bricklayer might have been interchanged with the pastry chef and none would have been the wiser**.

'Caught my eye'
One final example: I've observed that a lot of part-time digital photography enthusiasts don't want an idea, because they think it will hamper their freedom and constrain their activities. They want to haphazardly grab any "photo opportunity" that happens to pass their way. Which, if that's what you want to do, that's fine with me; you own your own photography. But it's pareidolia one day, a sunset the next, an architectural detail here, a bride in the park there. (Not to forget the quintessential: flowers and cats.) And they'll say something like, "I just take the camera when I go for a walk and photograph anything that catches my eye." That seems like a dreadfully weak-dishwater idea for working, a framework for little more than desultory camera-pointing. (I confess to never having liked the phrase "caught my eye.") But then, consider Henry Wessel—wasn't his whole life's work really just "what I saw on my walk"? He worked incredibly hard at it: putting high mileage on the ol' shoe-leather, photographing persistently, editing thoroughly and all the way to the conclusion of the finished fine-art print and book after book. And, sure enough: "The world is filled with incredible things," Wessel said. "So I’m happy to just let my eye be caught by something. If something catches my eye that’s enough reason to take the picture." He said that. (Of course it was further honed.)

tl;dr: evaluate your own working idea not by its beauty or how profound it sounds but by how well it works for you. A good idea enables and inspires. It has flexibility and adaptability. And consistency; it keeps on working. It lasts through time and keeps you motivated to pursue it further. It promotes creativity rather than stifling it. It gives your photographing direction and a framework (its "bones" as I started out calling it), a purpose, and richness.

What, me worry?
Yeah, I know, we all think we can photograph anything. August Sander's work included landscape, architecture, and nature. But it might as well not have. As a quick litmus test, I'd say you probably don't have a working idea yet until you recognize pictures you might take but that don't fit. A list of "I do this too" categories. To do something in addition to the main stream of your work, you need your work to have a main stream.

And don't worry about the AS. That can be constructed after the fact. If it's ever needed at all—being honest, the world seldom cares. How many photographers are shown in museums? 0.01%? As many as that? The working idea doesn't have to justify or explain you. It can be deep and/or smart, why not, but it doesn't have to be. It just has to rev your engine and get the camera in your hand, and result in the kind of picture that hits the spot for you. And do it again tomorrow. And the next day. Those who find an idea that becomes a style that becomes a signature that becomes a lifetime's work are the lucky lotto winners.

As before, these thoughts are not prescriptive, merely a quick attempt*** to be descriptive. If they lead to any thoughts that help you, then good; if they don't, don't worry about it. I'm just frinkin'.

Oh, and I actually have one more thing to say about bones. I'll try to intersperse something else in between, in the meantime, in case you are bored.

Mike

*I sometimes have a hard time getting off a topic, and I know it. I get enthusiastic. I want to take a deeper dive.

**I had the idea of taking Sander's idea and turning it on its head. Ed Meese, one of Ronald Reagan's top advisors, once came to the Corcoran School to "volunteer," because his wife was on the Board. They set him to work painting a wall. I thought of taking a picture meaning to title it "House Painter" in a Sanderesque typology of Washingtonians, but the Secret Service wouldn't let me get near him.

***This essay: begun at 9:15 a.m., finished at 11:35 a.m. How good could it be?

"Bones" Part I and Part II

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Featured Comments from:

Not THAT Ross Cameron: "Thanks for this Mike. That’s what I was getting at with my Q in my Bones Part II comment. Ideas can also be poorly conceived and well executed, and vice versa. OK, so it’s not just me that finds AS and placards sometimes a dense babble. I appreciate I’m not in the art scene, and so might not understand where the concepts and language have been and are going. Your story of the bramble photos reminds me of going to see the Sydney Biennale several years ago. Someone had taken a few black-and-white photos of a large area of grass, either early a.m. or late p.m. There were some mounds, which stood out via their shadows. But there was nothing of interest to catch the eye in these photos—no composition. The placards indicated that an infamous building / institution used to stand on the site. Translation—all idea and no execution. And probably the initial germination of an idea—may not have been well thought through."

Mike replies: One of my critical principles, not very popular or respectable in my lifetime generally, is that a photograph should be good to look at.

In some way. Whatever else it is or does.

To me, one of the glaring weaknesses of some of the work given attention in museums I've seen (not that I see all that much of it), as you point out, is that it's all idea—and the ideas sometimes aren't even good ones. For instance, I saw a show in Chicago of "pictures" that were putatively of the night sky, each one titled with the coordinates of the sky where the camera was supposedly pointed. The "pictures" were all rectangles of pure black. That struck me as wrongheaded in several ways—for one, you get the joke right away, and seeing multiple examples of it across a whole exhibit didn't amplify or clarify anything; next, it deprives a real photographer of attention from the institution (in diets this is called displacement—one of the reasons for eating lots of non-starchy plants is that they displace less healthy foods in the diet); and it's not accurate, because there is often lots to see in a night sky. I'm sure real astrophotographers would have been greatly surprised to learn that there is nothing to see in the night sky but unrelieved, featureless blackness.

Look at Dave Lumb's Blurb book linked below—that's a modest idea, but it works, in my opinion, at the length of the book he's made, and I've never seen it before. It's a better idea in my opinion than those rectangles of black.

Dave_lumb: "As a UK Fine Art graduate in 1982 I didn't have to write an artist statement. They were never mentioned. So when did they become 'A Thing'? Meanwhile: 'I just take the camera when I go for a walk and photograph anything that catches my eye.' Sometimes that works for me. Something caught my eye and when I saw another example it became an idea."

Mike replies: We haven't talked yet about how we get ideas.

MikeR: "I needed an AS recently in order to submit work to a state sponsored art exhibition. Cripes! Most such statements make me want to puke. But, forced into it, I crafted something that didn't offend me with flowery language, but more or less retrospectively 'explained' how I go about things. My wife, then my daughter, edited and made suggestions. I let ChatGPT have a go at it. The result was partly barfable, but brought in some good points, so I incorporated those, reworked the thing again, and again passed it to wife and daughter for further scrutiny.

"I learned something about what I actually do from this exercise, so it wasn't totally pointless. I've taken to crafting my own wall placards, a 5x6" thing affixed to the rear of the framed work, that borrows a bit from the IPTC standard, with 'Caption' and 'Description' blocks, the latter containing technical details about the piece. Finally, at 83, I feel focused and organized about my photography. Most of it still sucks, but there ya go."

Nick Cutler: "Ideas have you. Long ago, a colleague I very much respected said 'You don't have ideas, ideas have you.' And once an idea has got you it's impossible to ignore; you have to run with it wherever it goes...."

James Meeks: "In museums where I’ve worked, we usually call the wall placards 'didactic panels,' sometimes 'text panels,' meaning they are informative panels, placards, labels, etc. Other institutions may call them something else.

"As for the text painted right on the wall, nowadays it’s typically vinyl cut on a plotter and applied by staff. I did do some by screen print but that was a disaster. There are other methods I’ve heard of or seen but have not tried. The pieces of paper by a work are merely referred to as labels and come in all sorts of forms. Some are short and sweet while others can be fairly long and are typically written by the curator. When you put the works in a gallery, we say we’re doing an install, and when it comes down it’s a de-install. Not a real word except in the museum field as far as I know."

James Bullard: "I hate writing artist statements. They are only done when exhibitors demand them; to me, they are meaningless. The last one I 'wrote' was done using AI. It didn't read much differently than the pap I would have written myself but it caused me much less anguish to produce."

SteveW: "Re 'Caught my Eye': Thank you for this. This is how I am with a camera anymore, and why I switched to using my iPhone as my primary camera. It's always with me, easy and quick to use, and I'm capturing images that I would have had a difficult time capturing with my 'real camera.' It's been liberating and fun. The iPhone images are well into the 'good enough' zone for me. I suppose my genre of work would be snapshots. It's weird, but if I go out with my real camera (Fuji X-T5) it's harder for me to find shots than simply carrying my iPhone (15 Pro Max) and letting the shots find me. I'm not saying I'm capturing anything tremendous, or building any kind of body of work, but it's more fun for me this way. The Happy Snapper."

Dave Millier: "The Royal Photographic Society have the concept of the 'Statement of Intent' in their distinctions programmes:

A Statement of Intent that defines the purpose of the work, identifying its aims and objectives. A cohesive body of work that depicts and communicates the aims and objectives set out in the Statement of Intent. A body of work that communicates an individual's vision and understanding.

"For their ARPS and FRPS distinctions, a candidate submits a portfolio of images along with the SOI. The SOI is used by the assessors to help them judge the portfolio. I think it is useful for the photographer, too, as it focuses their attention on exactly what they are trying to achieve and portray and helps in the decision-making about what images to include and what to leave out. For me, thinking about the RPS approach has led me to shift gears away from shooting individual images that I later attempt to group into genres, to thinking with a project/portfolio mindset right from the start. The SOI is essential to that shift."

Jim Simmons: "Lee Friedlander liked that one of his friends said Lee wouldn't know an idea if it bit him on the ass. He claimed to have no 'ideas' that he worked from, not even any interests. But after years of photos piling up that had commonalities, the photos revealed to him what he'd been interested in. He, like Wessel, just went out into the world and took the photos that presented themselves to them. Of course, they had the talent to see them."

Mike replies: I think Lee is being disingenuous about that. (Which is his right.) He's got his own way of working, but the titles of many of his books describe ideas. And the ideas are easy to see in the work.

Jim Simmons replies: "I don't know, Mike, I'm inclined to accept Mr. Friedlander's statement at face value. A day before your post, I was rereading an interview with Lee by John Paul Caponigro in a 2002 issue of Camera Arts magazine. He was a little testy/evasive with some of Caponigro's questions, but he especially refused to be pinned down on working from ideas. I quote: 'Anything that looks like an idea is probably just something that has accumulated, like dust. It looks like I have ideas because I do books that are all on the same subject. That is just because the pictures have piled up on that subject. Finally I realize that I am really interested in it. The pictures make me realize that I am interested in something.' He continues, 'I hardly ever think about doing work. I think about going somewhere that might interest me.'

"I am currently in the process of creating a monograph of my 1970s black-and-white work, and I'm trying to apply Friedlander's concept of looking at the photos to discover what my ideas actually were, because aside from a few documentary projects, my work tends to be, like Friedlander's and Wessel's, visuals I stumbled across while living my life with a camera slung over my shoulder. The photos are more a framed arrangement of 2D and 3D shapes reflecting light in interesting ways than they are photographs of the actual objects within the frame. I'm only realizing this in retrospect."

Tom Burke: "I've seen some of Sander's images before, and liked them. Like you, I'm not sure his AS stands up. Looking at those two images today, however, what struck me was how both men were being injured by their occupation. The bricklayer is compressing his spine with the repeated weight of those platforms of bricks, and sooner or later his back wouldn't have been able to take the load anymore. As for the pastry chef, I can't help but wonder how long it was before he had his heart attack.... Time and knowledge helps us to see things in a different light."