The Providential Shit Detector

BJS posted a still life done with a digital camera and lens equivalent to 35mm focal length. I felt results weren’t up to par, but a commenter suggested it was “Alternative Photography” – “Has a lovely charcoal or graphite drawing quality to it.”

When I think “alternative photography” I think of argyrotypes, cyanotypes, chrysotypes and platino-palladiotypes, Luminos liquid emulsion and oatmeal box cameras, Polaroid transfers and X-rays, callotypes and kallitypes, gum bichromate and albumen, edible prints made with nontoxic chemistry, carbro and gumoil processes, etc. Not digital photography.

As to charcoal and graphite, beware the “painterly” (or charcoal-y or whatever) temptation. I yield to it sometimes myself, so I know whereof I speak. No photo can be as painterly as paint or as graphitic as graphite. Photography has its own qualities, which admittedly may overlap those of other graphic media in the big Venn diagram of categories that’s sold as art crit.

Maybe the fundamental problem is that BJS’s best photos (unlike, say, my own) are dynamic, while still life holds still i.e., it’s static. BJS’s top-notch work conveys the impression of a thing seen – a glimpse, an epiphany, a recognition – one day perhaps a revelation. His photos are, how you say, outgoing and extroverted, anabolic, affirmative and celebratory, even if they’re photos of somebody who’s just done up a spoonful of junk. But as I said, still life is inherently static: contemplative, catabolic, lysis after the crisis, a museum showcase whose central exhibit has been removed for further study.

Here my interlocutor protested: “Hmmm. Ok. But, ‘beware’???? and ‘temptation’???? Yikes!”

Yes! Yes! Beware, beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair.

Well, let’s not go too far; still, I won’t abate my minatory mood. Making good pictures (or poems or whatever) is largely a matter of learning to resist temptation – the temptation to pull the bull over your audience’s eyes, to imitate things that evoke a built-in reaction, to copy art they’re already familiar with. This is sentimentalism in the sense of George Meredith’s famous definition: “The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done.” Instead of painfully building up an evocative image that nobody’s ever seen before, I can photograph a cute li’l baby sucking its toes, or make a movie of a naked lady doing hanky-panky. Those things are guaranteed to get a reaction because large subsets of the human race are programmed to respond to them. There are also big cohorts programmed to respond positively to images that look like oil paintings or charcoals, because that’s Fine Art and confers status. My dear, so nice to see you, what sitcom did you watch last night whilst I was reading Proust in the original? So silly to translate it as “Remembrance of Things Past,” don’t you think? That old Shakespeare has a lot to answer for.

To speak more generally, remember Hemingway’s advice: “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.” The rest of us need it too.