It is a lonely thing, being a blogger. Countless thousands of us are out there, citizen journalists, using the Web to share with audiences we may or may not have. What a joy it is then to be able to enter a dialogue, to discourse with another.

Beth is a Canadian writer and graphic artist with whom I have been conversing. We have agreed to an online discussion, an E-dialogue, which will, in time, find its own path.

Dear Tony,

Happy New Year, very much belated! I hope you will forgive my tardiness; I’ve been very consumed with professional work which has had tight deadlines, and with family issues to do with the recent illness of my sister-in-law and our two aged fathers. I’ve been turning our conversation, so far, over in my head and thinking about where we might begin a more public dialog.

And then I keep going back to your photographs themselves – those breathtaking images of “your beloved Maniototo” which stunned me with their beauty. Perhaps we might begin there, and talk about the challenge of beauty itself for the artist, whether in words (for me, primarily) or images (for you). How can a 21st-century artist approach this concept of the beautiful in a fresh way, trying to convey what it arouses in us without creating something that is saccharine or hackneyed, something that goes beyond “calendar art?”

I experience beauty as a primary inspiration and source of hope, but I realize that it is dangerous material in my hands, with the potential to distort my words into something I did not mean, something untruthful — because it is incomplete without the sense of being seen through the soul of a person who has lived and experienced the unbeautiful, the terrible, the utterly Other. Beauty without this poignancy is not fully felt, to me.

But what do you think?

Hello Beth:
Like you, the last six weeks have been a wild rollercoaster of a ride. Perhaps the analogy of the surfer, riding the Bondi pipeline, is a more accurate metaphor. At times, I have felt as if I was rushing down the side of the wave, barely in control, with a vast wall of water looming above me, with meeting client deadlines the light at the end of the tunnel. At any time, I could lose control, and then everything would cave in. Frankly, it hasn’t been a necessarily pleasant journey! Fortunately, I seem to stayed on my board (mostly) and I’m coming out of this somewhat terrifying experience. So, in the time available to me for before I head to the North Island, I thought I would begin our discussion.
It’s probably an appropriate place to start, the idea of how an artist deals with the issue of beauty. It brought me back to my artist statement, which you can read here. In many ways the statement, which I wrote during a long dark night of the soul in Africa, has proved to be a profound and anchoring thing for me. It was as if all the roads which I have travelled in my lifetime came together. I arose around 4 a.m., in the liquid blackness of an African night, a blackness punctuated by the strange and alien noises of the creatures that move in it, and after stepping outside for 10 minutes or so to confront it and smoke a cigarette, the penny, as they say, fell into place. A strange compulsion had come upon me, a kind of road to Damascus experience, and even though I knew I needed the sleep, my mind wouldn’t let me, and held me by the scruff of the neck until it was done (about an hour and a half later). Then I collapsed for another hour or so before it was time to rise and go back to the workshop I was assisting.
I think that writing one’s artist statement is a very defining experience. I know it certainly was for me. It had brought together all the experiences of my life, and in some strange way gave clarity to what I had been doing, and an indication of the road ahead. It is the thing I visit whenever I am uncertain of the path I am following, a kind of lighthouse to remind me where I am.
You see, whenever I revisit it, it is as if I am looking at myself in the mirror, reminding myself of who I am. And why I am.
And why I am.
Perhaps I can start there.
Over the years I suppose I have journeyed in and out of the different rooms that comprise photography. I’ve turned my hand to documentary, to landscape, and portraiture and wedding photography. I have even, on the odd occasion, shot sport or natural history. In those times I was really seeking to build my skills and a variety of different photographic areas. You see, all those rooms have interconnecting doors. Over time, as I worked my way up the spiral from beginner to wherever I am now, I have revisited those things again and again and again, each time trying to add something new to my photographic vocabulary. I suppose, over time, I have acquired a certain facility. None of that however, is really worth anything of itself. I think it was Edward Weston who said that there is nothing worse than the technically brilliant execution of a fuzzy concept. In the end, possessing all the tools/toys and having the skills to work for them to their potential is of minimal value. Adding something to the sum total of human experience is.
I reached a point about 15 years ago where I realised that while my photographs were technically sound, the concepts were fuzzy. It was a frightening realisation, but a necessary one. I had reached that point where, if one is both lucky and blessed, one comes to realise that photography for its own sake is of little or no consequence. I realised that, for all my knowledge, the humble snapshot had a greater intrinsic value than any of my Ansel Adams like landscapes. I mean, why photograph the landscape anyway? The original is infinitely superior and far more perfect. Who was I to mimic God’s creation? And so, for a time, I journeyed through the Slough of Despond. For a time, I wondered whether the 15 years I had invested in learning photography had been a pointless journey down some cul-de-sac.
Then I read a book of Sam Abell’s work. In it, he talks about reaching a point where he really didn’t know what whether he wanted to continue in photography or not. It was only when he read a book on Japanese garden design that he realised the art of photography lies in framing. This realisation gave the impetus to pick up his camera again and continue on.
It wasn’t quite like that for me. It took me some time to realise the running and to this brick wall, and having to confront the question of the point of photography, while difficult, was actually a gift.
Not long after that, I went out for an evening walk, at a time when the city has settled and pulled the duvet up around its ears, and the night air doesn’t seem quite so cluttered by the business of human consciousness. It is time to walk, reflect, and think. They say that angels talk to a man when he walks, and for me the night has always been a peculiarly profitable time for doing this.
As I walked to the end of our cul-de-sac, I happened to look up. There, suspended on the sky before me in all its glory, hung a gloriously liquid full moon. On the telephone poll above me, in the glare from the street lights, several moths danced and circled and paid homage to the demigod. I stood entranced, enraptured by a site that for all its simplicity was incredibly complex and somehow perfect. As the Moth Song continued, I wondered how I could possibly capture its beauty so that others could share what I was beholding. I wondered how many other people had stood at the end of their cul-de-sac and watched moths dancing in the moonlight. I realised I had been given yet another gift. Somehow, this small event was a symbol, a leitmotif for all that is wonderful in nature.
I returned home and day in bed with the moths still dancing in my mind. As I did so, I thought back to my boyhood in the wonder of the trees in the forests where I grew up. They were my friends, my secret companions and the source of my boyhood imaginings. I realised then, that photography can be a sort of visual shorthand, and that the popularity of the image lies in its ability to summarise, to say in the 60th of the second what might require more time and words. Those moths dancing in the moonlight was a moment that can be laid down in an image, yet require a novel to convey. Small wonder then that imagery is increasingly replacing text. I suspect however that is a topic for a future letter!
Once you realise the power of this incredible tool, the camera, you realise you have the facility to do great good or to do great evil. In other words, to be human.
As I pondered it, I realised that I could easily take on a documentary project that exposed the harsh underbelly of life in my city. I could photograph derelicts and street people and those hard done by on the outer edge of society. But to what purpose? Wireless might give me some sort of false sense of doing something for the greater good, using my talents, would I, by going down this road, really be adding anything to the sum total of human experience?
You see, for me, that is a matter of primary importance. It is easy to take, it is easy to live a life of consumption, it is easy to absorb the planet’s resources with little thought for our, tamariki, our children. If I appear somewhat didactic, I make no apology. Caring for the planet and looking to the needs of those who will follow is of great importance to me. And because I have some facility with photography, it is my responsibility to use it, to try and make a difference.
So do I draw attention to the ugly, to the hateful, to the distressing? I can, for I have that right. Should I choose to exercise it. But do I want to? Will i, by making images of pollution or destruction and holding them up in the mirror of mankind, add anything to the sum total of human experience? Does a shock value have any lasting effect?
I suppose I thought these things over for a year or so. And then I remembered. I remembered the moths in the moonlight, I remembered the trees whispering outside my bedroom as a boy, and I made my choice.
It is easy to be tried, to be visually banal. It is easy to decorate the surface of the chocolate box, to be formulaic. I could easily stand on the side of a hill in the late afternoon, waiting for sunset, with a gravel road meandering gently into the distance, and sheep winding slowly o’er the lea. There are plenty of books that will help me to achieve this kind of result. There are plenty of competition is that will teach me the techniques and approaches I need to be successful at this type of photography. Is it however little more than the type of photography that says I stood there, I photographed that, with a romantic mood is thrown in?
I think, our greatest resource in any form of artistic endeavour is ourselves. In the end, all artistic works are autobiographical. As you know, the theme is critical, and for a visual artist, self-knowledge is of the utmost importance. Of course self-knowledge is not some kind of absolute, some readily packageable and easily defined quality. It is a shape shifter, sometimes a chimera, and endless journey to a destination that is only ever of whistlestop. If we are lucky. Beauty is a terrifying and demanding mistress, but she is no absolute; she is as we perceive her. And I believe that beauty exists in each and every one of us, that moths dance in the moonlight of every human being’s heart.
So to my landscape photography. If I am to see the intrinsic beauty in this scene, I believe I have to come to it with an open mind and, more importantly, an open heart. I have come to realise that my journey through photography has not been a process of learning, rather it has been a process of un-learning. To see what is intrinsically beautiful, I have to learn to see it as for the first time, rather than be a Miss Havisham, surrounded by the dusty relics of a lifetime’s memories. And therein lies the challenge.
I suppose I have always had a fondness for ageing knights on rusty horses, in search of windmill dragons.

Tony, I’d like to continue talking about beauty in art. You wrote:
Those moths dancing in the moonlight was a moment that can be laid down in an image, yet require a novel to convey. Small wonder then that imagery is increasingly replacing text. I suspect however that is a topic for a future letter!

Re-reading this passage made me reflect: are we, as artists who depict nature in words or images, trying to show and share the beauty we discover there, or do we find in nature an expression of an abstract ideal of beauty that already lives in our souls? What did your moths represent on that night? Didn’t they stir something in you that was already present, just as a landscape may, or the flocks of snow geese I stopped and watched a few weeks ago, and this is what moves us to try to create, to try to express the emotions that arise? In other words, there is an interplay between the human being and the natural environment which is, itself, natural: we are meant to be part of each other, and to feel something – but we realize that a lot of people are much less in touch with this aspect of themselves.

Like you, I also made a choice: to try to write more about positive aspects of life and less about argument and politics and what is wrong. Some of that choice is based on self-preservation, some on personality and temperament, but some of it is simply an artistic decision: I want to try to share what moves me, and to express something about my own journey through life, a journey which is a search for meaning, connection, and truth. The longer I live, the more sure I am that the sages are right: that truth and light are within each of us – and that everything is connected. But it is also true that everything has its opposite: for the light, there is the opposite side of darkness; for truth, falsehood; for beauty, ugliness; for order, chaos.

In the assisted-living home where my father-in-law lives, the walls of the hallways are hung with beautiful pictures: bouquets of flowers, children playing, lovely landscapes, pastoral meadows, calm pictures of houses and seashores and gardens. I go by them often, and think about why people choose these sort of images: when I was a young painter I painted my fair share of them too. But now, at mid life, they all feel like cliches to me, except for the occasional image, often a watercolor, where instead of a frozen perfect moment, the sky indicates change and movement and a more complex emotional state than calm happiness-that-once-was.

The truest art, for me, does this: it tries to hold the dark and the light together. There is a sense of edginess or uneasiness, as Pete mentioned before, which may not mean literally showing the garbage on the side of the trail, but does indicate an awareness of the change that is ever-present in life. (I feel this in some of your landscapes but it’s hard to describe or point to what does it.) The beautiful moment passes, a cloud obscures the sun, calmness and upheaval alternate in our lives, death follows birth. As humans we know this, while we may we try forever to deny it. While we may be drawn to beauty for its own sake, and need it very much, it is the poignancy of this deep knowledge of passage and change that stirs me as an artist and writer. Frankly, I find it much easier to express in words than in pictures, but you may disagree!

with best wishes from Montreal, in the poignancy of early spring –
Beth

Letter To Beth Tuesday, 19 August 2008

Beth:

It has taken me time to respond to this. Life and work have stood between me and  my need to make a response. My apologies.

Revisiting your last contribution, I found your comments  so rich that it was hard to know where to begin. So I am going to start…somewhere…perhaps with my moths in the moonlight and what they have to tell me about Beauty.

I am not sure I entirely concur with your thoughts about the pictures in the old folk’s home where your father lives being a depiction of beauty, and that you have grown past it. I think there is a significant gap between Art and Ornament, an abyss perhaps, in this case between beauty and decoration, or maybe between the representation of beauty as opposed to ornamentation.

I guess we have all seen those rural scenes where the lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea. There are fading prints of such things in homes all over the world. This is not Beauty, or even a passable facsimile of it; rather it is sentiment, often ill-or unconsidered. This is the realm of derivation and cliché. In New Zealand we have our fair share of this (some would say more than our fair share); snow-clad mountains, gentle beaches with teal-coloured water and of course gambolling spring lambs. I am sure you have your own versions of these up there in Canada. Are these efforts the depiction of the Beauty of Nature? I would venture to suggest only marginally. While the subject material may have the capacity to show it, the treatment of nature shows minimal understanding of beauty, Beauty or indeed Nature.

This brings me to the Shores of Semantics, to three rocks in the sand which are tripped over frequently. I want to take a little time with language, since I feel it not only defines our attitudes and approaches but also has an influence upon them. Sublime is a word often misunderstood and frequently misused today. You hear people talk of a weekend’s holiday being sublime, or a concert performance being sublime. The speaker here is talking about how memorable it was. In fact the word has a much more precise meaning and one with an art historical context. Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) identified the Sublime (usually capitalized today) as something so vast, grand, or dangerous that it could only inspire awe, fear or veneration. Accordingly, artists immediately supplied a demand for windswept landscapes and storms at sea (Ruisdael, Turner), enormous cityscapes (Cole, Martin), struggles between man and beast (Delacroix, Rubens), and all manner of variation — most with the tacit assumption that the forces of the Divine were immanent in Nature (Bierstadt, Friedrich).-Faculty of Creative & Critical Studies, UBC Okanagan. Thus the current meaning of sublime has been watered down and pasteurised to a tasteless shadow of its original meaning. It can be seen here that for the early romantic painters, the beauty in nature was a thing to be considered with awe, to be awe-full, and here we have the second rock, now repainted to show an altogether different countenance. Both words contain the idea of grandeur, of something to be taken seriously, rather than the saccharine-sweet travesty that passes for beauty in the calendars of today.

The third of these rocks in the sand is picturesque. Used today it contains the same watered-down romanticism, the same nod to a barely-understood concept that both sublime and awe-ful  ( sic. awful) do. In 1782, the Rev William Gilpin published his Observations on the River Wye and several parts of South Wales, etc. relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the summer of the year 1770 (London 1782). In it he laid out some of his ideas on how the landscape should be interpreted. As he saw it, Nature was capable of producing textures and colours, but rarely capable of producing the perfect composition. For him the picturesque lay between the feminine (yin) of beauty and the masculine (yang) of the sublime. For him the picturesque was a set of rules for depicting nature. It is worth noting here that improvements in travel and income had created opportunities for domestic tourism and many of these people took the opportunity to sketch what they saw before them. Gilpin’s treatise was therefore timely and an instruction manual of sorts. Grey’s Elegy in A country Churchyard is in many ways a poetic interpretation of the view these tourists enjoyed.

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

In other words we are shown the view from the point-of view of an observer.

It seems to me that this idea has continued to this day, and that we see picturesque and beautiful being used synonymously. Nature is depicted as something soft and sentimental, as something to be consumed. In a way, the picture postcard is a classic example of this, a cheap way to appropriate and to consume the landscape. Martin Parr’s images around this idea flesh out this idea of the tourist as consumer. In fact the whole tourism industry, born in the concept of the Grand Tour and now and object of mass consumption. People travel to New Zealand to enjoy its beauty, as no doubt they do to Canada. But is this appreciation or consumption? Parr’s images would suggest the latter.

The advent of the Box Brownie made this available to “the masses” and generated a huge industry which continues to this day. Just walk into any camera shop and you will see an enormous range and number of cameras designed to remove any need for technical expertise from the owner. Their function, it seems to me, is to enable the user to ‘consume’ the landscape as cheaply and expeditiously as possible. A friend snidely refers to these as PHD cameras (push, here, Dummy) and, while there is a degree of superiority in his comments, he has a point. Stand near any place that purports to offer a photo-opportunity and you will see people busily photographing the scene or, preferably, themselves in front of it. The latest generation of point-and-shoots even offer face detection to make sure the person being photographed in front of the monument/landscape/building is correctly-exposed.  For these people the object is to create a memory key for later consumption, when they return home.

All of which has little to do with my own attitudes towards Beauty.

As you know, I am primarily a landscape photographer. I am drawn to the land in all sorts of ways at different times. Over the last few years I have explored why I am drawn to this and in what way. In fact my work is based on this exploration, on the need to discover what it is that draws me and what it is I want to say about what is before me. There is no question: the landscape, in fact any landscape, is beautiful at times and sublime at others. I have stood out in bad weather, at once terrified, and once elated.  I have stood out there when it was balmy and …feminine. and responded to what was before me as best I could. And, as time has gone by, I have allowed my feelings to feed through into my work.

I have given myself permission.

It hasn’t been easy.

But it has informed my work and informed me. In that order.

There is no question that the landscape is for me a thing of infinite beauty. A thing of infinite Beauty. My moths in the moonlight are what they are.

In fact they just are.

From the realisation of what those moths are about I have come to realise a lot about the nature of being, and to realise that my landscape photographs are in fact autobiographies, journeys into and within myself. Perhaps they are statements about a place and time. Perhaps I am not so far removed from those C17th English country gentlemen on their Grand Tour…

I have one last comment and then it is up to you. Of all the New Zealand painters I admire, perhaps Colin McCahon is my favourite. I was invited, a few years ago, to do a Masters on him. I rather regret I did not take up the opportunity.

For whatever reason, I have felt a certain kinship with him. In a way, I can identify with a number of his issues as an artist.  Of his painting he said:

“My painting is almost entirely autobiographical – it tells you where I am at any given point in time, where I am living and the direction I am pointing in. In this present time it is very difficult to paint for other people – to paint beyond your own ends and point directions as painters once did.”

From time to time, as I lose my way, I return to the artist’s statement I wrote one dark night in Africa. I test it and find it resonates for me as much today as it did then.

Noho ra mai

22 November, 2008

Photography and Feeling

“When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”

Robert Frank, LIFE (26 November 1951)

at right, an image from Robert Frank’s book, “London/Wales”

Dear Tony,

Thanks so much for your long letter and thoughtful comments on beauty and photography. It’s complicated, isn’t it, trying to grapple with what makes a picture beautiful in a lasting way, something more than the ubiquitous, predictable postcard image taken from a scenic vantage point, chosen as such because it really is “beautiful” in a way that makes most people respond?

I think I’d like to pick up on a topic you mentioned toward the end of your letter, the question of allowing one’s feelings to come through in the work, because I think this is crucial to what we’re trying to get at.

Why is it difficult for some of us to allow this? I wonder if working professionally from a young age has something to do with it. For me, as a graphic designer and illustrator (beginning in my twenties) it was of critical importance that my work be technically excellent and that I master the “craft” so that the work would retain high quality from inception through final reproduction. As you know, I think, I’m married to a photographer and have worked with him professionally for thirty years; this was true for him as well. When you’re doing commercial work, even if it is editorial work that allows for large degree of personal interpretation, technical considerations are very high on the list. I think this can be dampening to deeper and freer expression, and one has to see this and consciously address it in order to grow as an artist. Conversely, of course, the person who is only concerned with “feeling” can be held back by his or her lack of skill or interest in the technical side of their work. It’s the people who excel in both that interest me the most, and although I’m not personally doing a lot of visual art these days, this is true in my approach to writing.

Some artists seem like they’ve never had a problem with this – Natalie d’Arbeloff is one who comes to mind, though I hope we’ll hear from her in the comments. But even Picasso, who we think of as being so inventive, talked about having to deconstruct what he had learned as an adult in order to rediscover the unfettered creativity of a child, and of non-western cultures where technique is less prized.

I also wonder about how visual subject matter itself affects our ability to imbue our art with feeling, and suspect that it is particularly difficult – though not impossible – when the subject in landscape. J. came home the other day with some books by Robert Frank, certainly one of the most influential photographers of the last sixty years. One of them was London/Wales, from an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 2003 of photographs taken in the early1950s of London financiers and Welsh coal miners. While one might expect the view of London bankers to be negative, and that of Welsh miners positive, this really wasn’t the case: both were moving, both were intensely human. Frank showed us that the clothing of the bankers – the top hats and dark overcoats – was as much a uniform and leveler as the coal-encrusted clothing and skin of the miners, and went beyond it to revel the people underneath. The surrounding – the quality of the atmosphere — the foggy city and the rugged Welsh landscape — become in his photographs intrinsic parts of the human portraits. I was very moved by the progression of images, and realized that my own judgmentalism was being laid aside as I viewed them, replaced by Frank’s’ compassion and nuance. It was clear to me at the end that Frank not only  photographed from a point of view, but that his view was not the immediate one, but something conscious, developed, and deeper that he had probably come to over a considerable amount of time. Some of these images, I am sure, will stay with me forever.

“Quality doesn’t mean deep blacks and whatever tonal range. That’s not quality, that’s a kind of quality. The pictures of Robert Frank might strike someone as being sloppy – the tone range isn’t right and things like that – but they’re far superior to the pictures of Ansel Adams with regard to quality, because the quality of Ansel Adams, if I may say so, is essentially the quality of a postcard. But the quality of Robert Frank is a quality that has something to do with what he’s doing, what his mind is. It’s not balancing out the sky to the sand and so forth. It’s got to do with intention.” (Elliott Erwitt)

I’m curious about how you have given yourself permission to allow your own feelings to come though in your work, and why it was hard, and also curious to hear from readers: how have you yourself grappled with both technique and emotion in your own approach to art or writing?