THE PHOTOGRAPHIC GESTURE

© Gretchen Garner

The New Art Examiner, October 1976

In looking at photographs, making them, and then writing about them, it has never seemed quite enough to say that the medium’s distinctions are purely physical; that a light-sensitive emulsion, a lens, a shutter and a continuous-tone image are the only factors that make a photograph different from a drawing or painting.  For example, our reactions to a photo-realist painting, say by Chuck Close, even though it is painstakingly copied from a photograph and looks like one (even incorporating such photographic phenomena as shallow depth-of-field), is quite different from our reaction to the photograph itself.  And that reaction is different not just because the photograph might be small and the painting large.  It is different because of how the images were made, the acts of observation and creation they imply.

What I want to do here is to investigate the actions that go into making a photograph, because some viewers still seem to harbor the notion that photographs are machine-made objects whose only variables are matters of luck—being in the right place at the right time with the right machine.  Looking at and even enjoying photographs without understanding their creation is something like looking at all the people in the world as gifts of the mythical stork.  We see them clearly but we have a completely wrong interpretation of their genesis and therefore of life in general.

The gesture of photography is different from the gestures of the other visual arts; I hope to show that photography is no less complex, difficult, and visual.  Indeed, my belief is that in many ways fine photography is more purely intellectual, purely visual, because the gestures involved are less connected to hand gestures but much more connected to intense observation, to harder seeing.

Photographers have basically a two-step process: in the first step the image is seen, chosen, and captured on film.  The second step involves the re-creation or re-presentation of the image, and most often this step takes place at a later time and place (usually in a darkroom).  The bridge between these two steps is film development—a boring necessity.  There are acts of discovery, choice, arrangement and craft that take place during both steps, but it is during the first that photography differs most from the other arts.

I find that most photographers emphasize one phase or the other.  Either they are at their peak during the camera-vision phase, seeking later to re-create the truth of that moment when they print, or they are at their peak during the printing phase, using the camera-captured images as so much raw material to be manipulated or combined later in the darkroom, for purposes they may never have imagined when they were shooting.  Sometimes, too, the creative high-point comes with a concept formulated before the shooting (planned sequences, for example), but even so, numerous unknown variables are encountered during the camera work.

The shooting phase involves the use of a camera, light meter and film.  An understanding of lenses, of light, of the recording properties of the chosen film, shutter speed and f/stop, and perhaps most importantly, the use of the edges of the photographic frame as a compositional tool, are aspects of the photographic craft that must be understood and utilized at this point.

The first act is to put oneself in proximity to the subject.  The photographer must literally go to his subject—not merely create from his imagination.  After that, the physical gestures are primarily those of aiming, selection, moving the camera (pressed against the face as an extension of the eye) up or down, or side to side, till the picture is right.  Then the finger releases the guillotining action of the shutter at the chosen moment in space and time, after which the image (in some cameras) disappears from the ground glass, captured and stored in a latent state on the film.

During this phase the element of time is most important.  Life is constant movement, and a photograph is made as one of the moments in the continuum of time is seen and frozen.  Thus an alertness to change, to the constant rearrangement of the elements before the camera, is required at this point.  In this heightened state of awareness the perceptions channeled through a single lens, the photographer makes his image ALL AT ONCE.  His picture is created whole by the particular gesture, or position in space and time, he assumes.

Now whether the photographer discovers his images in the world or sets up his shots in the studio, good camera work can usually be understood by one of three models: (1) hunting, (2) existential letting-go, or (3) sexual encounter.  All three models have in common an element of capture; the word “shooting” bears this out.  As Susan Sontag mordantly remarks, “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.  It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.”

The hunting model is perhaps the most common—witness the photographic safaris that have substituted cameras for guns.  But like Canon-armed businessmen “shooting” elephants, serious photographers hunt too.  A paradigm of this way of working is Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose phrase “the decisive moment” has become the universal description for the split second when all the elements come together to make the great picture.

Cartier-Bresson recalls his first Leica, “It became the extension of my eye, and I have never been separated from it since I found it.  I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to ‘trap’ life—to preserve life in the act of living.  Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.”  Later, Diane Arbus was to say about her work, “I am creeping forward on my belly like they do in war movies.”

Charles Harbutt describes the letting-go involved in the second model:  “I don’t take pictures, pictures take me.  I can do nothing except have film in the camera and be alert.  My adversary, a photograph, stalks the world like a roaring lion.  Pictures happen.  One can only trust one’s sensitivity, the bounty of the world, and the chemistry of Kodak.  This is the photographic method.”

Others have put it differently.  The photographer Robert Frank:  “It is always an instantaneous reaction to oneself that produces a photograph.”

Regarding the third model, there exists within the photographic act something akin to sexual satisfaction.  Edward Weston, in a discussion of the relationship of the photographer to his audience, says that “the feeling of having given is as important an item in art as it is in sex.”

But perhaps the reality photographed is more important than the audience.  Dorothea Lange, the great Farm Security Administration photographer, says about the photographer, “Among the familiar his behavior is that of the intimate rather than of the stranger.  Rather than acknowledge, he embraces; rather than perform, he responds.”

The most eloquent and delightful description of this mode comes, oddly, from an architectural photographer, Harold Allen.  Writing of a struggle to return before sunset to a building glimpsed early in the day, Allen says, “there was not a moment to lose, and without wasting a movement I assembled tripod, camera, lens, and filter, raising the lensboard as the focusing cloth settled around my head.  During my frantic adjustments of leveling and spacing, the golden light endured, casting long shadows forward from clods, bulldozers, and even my camera and me.  Suddenly I sensed—all but audibly—the urgent and desperate whisper: ‘Take me! I am yours!’  To my trembling hands the familiar adjustments of meter, diaphragm, shutter and cock were like the delicious frustrations of unfamiliar buttons, hooks, zippers, and elastic one encounters when urgently and cooperatively shedding impeding garments in the sudden realization of a longed-for opportunity:  I gently eased in the holder and, with pounding heart, pulled the dark slide, waited an endless moment, and plunged the release.  There was a satisfying click—then, almost immediately, the golden light faded to grey, and the shadows vanished.  Through sheer momentum rather than conviction I attempted another exposure, though all was softer now, but, as it turned out, the glory was spent.”

This first phase, then, is one of speed in action, of acute sensitivity to change and to time, when images are quickly captured on film.  Frequently more exposures are made than will finally get printed, because film is cheap and this particular situation will soon be gone forever.  In Weston’s words, “It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately.”

If a heightened awareness of the world is the characteristic of phase one, a contemplative distance from the world marks the second phase.  Alvin Langdon Coburn says, “I can do only…the making of the negative with the fire of enthusiasm burning at the white heat, but the final stage, the print, requires quiet contemplation, time, in fact, for its fullest expression.”

This time, the photographer reacts only to his captured images on film or contact sheets.  The real situation itself is past.  Closeted in the darkroom he tests his pictures, which must stand alone on their virtues as two-dimensional images.  Whether he wants to reveal the “truth” of his subject, to show, as West used to say, “the thing itself,” or whether he uses his images as parts of multiple, transformed or synthetic pictures (in common jargon, this is “straight” vs. “manipulated” or “pre-visualized” vs. “post-visualized”), the photographer’s image-making resources are the same:  light, film negatives, light sensitive materials, projection enlarger, and chemicals.

Once again, the eyes and the mind are the primary tools.  The hands are used to operate machinery, to hold back light (“dodging”), or to move the paper through the steps of chemical development.  This is especially true of the straight photographer whose repertory of materials and tools tends to be ascetically limited:  an enlarger with a sharp lens and paper of brilliant surface (to retain as much detail as possible).

Though the range of materials is limited, the standards are high, for the goal is to reproduce without loss of detail every tone in the scene photographed.  Ansel Adams holds that “A photograph is not an accident—it is a concept.  It exists at, or before, the moment of exposure of the negative.  From that moment on to the final print, the process is chiefly one of craft;….the fundamental thing which was ‘seen’ is not altered in basic concept.”  The craft Adams is talking about involves the choice of chemical formulas, papers, exposure, and methods of development.

An expanded attitude towards craft is held by the photographer who uses his camera-pictures as raw material for synthetic, evolved images.  For these manipulative workers the second phase is the phase of discovery and creation.  Jerry Uelsmann says, “Once in the darkroom the venturesome spirit should be set free—free to search and hopefully discover…There is the opportunity for an internal dialogue in the darkroom…a turning inwardly relative to what has been discovered outside.”

There is no limit to the actions now, and they often reselbe the mark-making of the other arts.  Purely photographic manipulations such as combination of images, use of film edge marks, chemical staining, solarization, sequencing, and negative printing can be supplemented by any other device known to the artist:  brush, pen or knife, even needle and thread, and the application of the image to any object—plate, cloth or sculpture, to name a few.  For these workers, to quote Bart Parker, “Things made lead to things to be made.”  An openness to discovery marks this mode.  Uelsmann says, “The truth is that one is more frequently blessed with ideas while working.”

For all photographers the model that explains this final state of creation best is the model of the midwife.  Pictures are assisted, lovingly handled and brought to life by alert hands and mind.  But every photographer knows he is not all-powerful, not the sole source of his pictures.  There is a magic, an alchemy at work—the power of light, lens, accident, the world itself—along side of which he must be a respectful, but intense collaborator.

SOURCES:

Harold Allen, “My Passionate Interest in Architectural Photography” (3/70, Good Lion Press)
Rudolf Arnheim, “On the Nature of Photography” (Critical Inquiry I:1)
Charles Harbutt, Travelog (MIT Press)
Nathan Lyons, ed., Photographers on Photography (Prentice Hall)
Susan Sontag, “Photography,” New York Review of Books, 10/15/73
Jerry N. Uelsmann (Aperture monograph)
The Daybooks of Edward Weston (Aperture)