Why I photograph – a reprise…

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is
transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.
::: Richard Avedon :::

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

~Henry Ward Beecher

Kia ora tatou:

In the course of this blog, I have from time to time, been asked why I photograph. Believe me, I ask this of myself most days. Sometimes the answers are firm, self-assured. At other times doubts have set in and I wonder why I do it.

In the previous post, SG asked this  question:

On another track, I’ve just finished going through ‘letters to Beth’. I think there is no greater or lesser (Ansel Adams/Robert Frank) – they just both great but different. To me is important why they did photography. Once I came across the life story of Jimmy Forsyth – a man with one eye due to a work accident, very little or no money and no idea of photography. On a whim he bought an old Kodak and in forty odd years Jimmy Forsyth produced the most outstanding record of his community. Why did Jimmy Forsyth do photography? “I was just catching what I knew was going to disappear” JF

What are you catching Tony? Why photography?

Fair enough. I will try to answer the question. Keep in mind that if you ask me in six months, my answer may well be different. It has taken a few days for a response to come through. I am grateful for the question and I hope this will in some way answer it.

From time to time I revisit my artist’s statement. It is really a cornerstone for me. It is both a point of self-definition and a tool to measure myself (as an artist) and my progress. I like to think of it as a kind of mile marker.

I reread it and re-evaluated it. And realised I have moved on, that it is time for a major rewrite. Some of it needs to be revisited, some to be rewritten, and some still holds true. When I wrote it two years ago, during a dark night in Africa, I was setting out on a journey which took me closer to the land and my relationship with it. My intention was both personal and didactic (ever the teacher in me). I wanted to make pictures which would make a difference, which would meet my need to be the best photographer I could be, but perhaps share my love for the natural world. Today, here and now, the former is of little importance, the latter still so, to a degree. I still love my gear, but it is no longer important what tools I have, as long as they are adequate for the task at hand. I still love the power of Photoshop to help me realise my vision. But these things are not ends in and of themselves.

One group of sentences struck me in this soon-to be-revised statement.

My first memories were of the wind carrying stories and pinning them to the needles of the pines outside my bedroom window. Some nights there were many left there for me to mull over, at other times they were relatively few. My imagination was obliged to fill in the gaps. So I came to love trees for the stories they had to tell.

I have mulled these over for a week, trying to place them in the context of where I am now and the effects of the knowledge I have gained in recent months. In that time I have studied Maori spirituality, experienced something of Waitaha, the first people here in new Zealand  and just recently, been given entry to the teachings of American First Nations people, much of which you cannot find in any book. They are destinations I have been travelling toward for a lifetime, a journey of re-membering. These gifts, these taonga, have had a profound effect on how I see the world and my place in it.

And of course the nature of my work.

I have come to realise that the notes pinned to the trees by the night winds or dropped by the whisper of passing birds’ wings still fascinate me. I need to translate them. I always have.

Of late my photography has veered distinctly to the left (or right). The mannequin series that seems to be playing out at the moment both surprises and fascinates me. It is an idea which began some eight years ago, and which I put down for a time. Now it has come back and needs to be followed, right or wrong, for better or for worse.

A good friend commented recently that my landscape photography seemed to be looking beyond the  landscape, to something else. True enough. I have always been fascinated by Nature and drawn by a sense of an animate landscape, of a mystery beyond what my eyes show me directly, with which I want to have a dialogue. It is the nature of that mystery which I try to explore in my photography, and which I am trying “to catch”. This seems to me to be one of the joys of the medium. In a way, it slows down time long enough (or short enough) for us to have time to read what the moment we caught has to tell us. In making photographs, we have a chance to collect and read the notes pinned to the trees.

The mannequins have, however, opened me to a new understanding. Standing silently in their carefully-contrived environments, they look out through the window and watch the world go by. Each day and night they are spectators of a surreal scene, of people rushing by, intent on their own lives and observers of the space between.

I began to wonder why I am drawn to record them and their vision of the world, why I would select views from entryways that enabled me to see from their point-of view, why I would try to stand close by and document the world according to them.

Now I think I have it.

The notes pinned to these trees were put there by me, to be deciphered by me when I was ready. The photographs I make are all personal post-its, reminders to me of what really matters, of what is really important. To Me.

For the mystic what is how.  For the craftsman how is what.  For the artist what and how are one.  ~William McElcheran

So to the picture at the top of the post,“Staring into a corner of space”.

These two mannequins looking through the window into space, at a Pleaides cluster bent through 90 degrees, are really me. The image is autobiographical, as all our photographs really are.

No matter how much we plan our journey towards  understanding, sooner or later, it always seems to turn right at the traffic  lights.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.  ~Amy Lowell

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Published on Sunday, December 21st, 2008, under Thinking about Photography and Art