I talked with Isaac Schell after his recent opening about the motivation and inspiration for his pictures. At first he frame photography as a compulsion. A way to get an image out of his head. He later conceded that Garry Winogrand got it right by saying, “I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.”
A picture I took, New York City
Photography is the invention of an impatient world. Insofar as It is a way to render a scene timeless, it varies little from the early functions of painting. However, the quickness with which photography can snapshot such a scene is where it has set itself apart. Photography is an enabler of faster-paced living. We augment and extend our memories by time shifting scenes. We can mediate a vacation through the lens, flatten an overwhelmingly deep scene, vignette a busy one, and most significantly grant ourselves a continuance to process and reprocess the witnessed event at later times. We mostly ignore the present, storing the past on SD cards, and fantasize about photographs we’d like to take in the future.
Beyond the documentary function of photography there are a number of post-structural functions, those that rely on the interpretation of the viewer. They fit nicely into three categories of design outlined by Donald Norman in his not so recent TED talk—the visceral, the behavioral, and the reflective.
The visceral function speaks to the content of a photograph. A pretty girl, a sunset, a landmark, violence, action, and so forth. These are the pictures in our albums and shoeboxes, gathering dust and yellowing as they attempt to preserve spent time.
The behavioral layer of a photograph contains its composition, the juxtaposition of objects, counterpoint, light and shadow, the mechanics of the scene. It is informed by and understood through the a knowledge of the operation of the camera/lens/film. These are the clever pictures we took in our first black and white photography class.
Lastly, the reflective function is that post-modern one, entirely reliant on the social context of a picture, entirely ignoring the visceral and behavioral. These pictures concern the backstory rather than the scene. They are new topographic photos of small town storefronts, street snapshots, Stephen Shore’s steak dinner, the mundane, photographs of nothing. They don’t have inherent meaning. The burden understanding their relevance falls entirely on the viewer, one with some knowledge of the history of photography and of the culture reflected by the mirror of these photographs.
When I take (I can’t bring myself to say “make a picture,” I’m just not that good at it) a picture I fixate on those functions of photography. I flex my eyes and brain too hard, it always seems to look like I tripped right before releasing the shutter. I end up a little too close, let some rogue element in the corner of the frame, or find perfectly dull flat light. By thinking about too many things, I accomplish very little in my picture-taking.
I get overly excited when I see that someone has unconsciously arranged their overflow recycling to look like a still-life—how quaint and lofty all at once, and Yes! it’s six PM with light hitting it at a wonderfully oblique angle. If I crouch just so, and take a step back, and stop down, and Click. Somehow I have managed to take nothing more and nothing less than a picture of garbage. It’s that other function of photography, the elusive and unteachable one, that contains a photograph’s aura.
