Saying His Last Words First

• Took photography too seriously in the 70’s and gave it up for twenty years. By ’98 I no longer took anything seriously, so had another shot.
  
• A word about Photoshop: I always use it, at least as a digital darkroom. The idea that some pictures are more digital than others makes no sense to me – what matters is the way a picture looks. How and why it was done may be fun to know, just as it’s fun to know that Beethoven went deaf – but so what? Wearing earplugs won’t help you write great music.
  
• What constitutes manipulation? Most photos represent a three-dimensional view in two dimensions. Is that manipulation? Put a ruler on a print and you’ll find many objects are not life size. Manipulation? Colorful scenes may be rendered in tones of gray. We may be shown only a fragment of what would be visible to the naked eye. Wide-angle or long-focus lenses are used to create startling effects. Long or short exposures give us images that are visually striking but clearly unnatural. Some photographers actually dodge or burn in parts of an image, or use filters or flash, or tilt the easel, or hand-color prints, or solarize or cross-process the film, or choose a grainy emulsion, or tweak contrast by using a particular grade of paper, or shoot with litho stock or infrared. These are all tricks meant to fool us, to manipulate the image and cloud the mind of the beholder.
  Ever read Sir Philip Sidney’s “Defense of Poesy”? Like other apologists of his time, he was defending not poetry per se but what we’d call fiction, which was scorned by grave men as being demonstrably untrue. It’s a case of Plato (who condemned poetry and music) versus Aristotle, a fight that Aristotle won long ago by a knockout. Call it unfair if you will, but Plato never really had a prayer.
  
• Let’s admit it: I’m an ithyphallic reductionist with a hard-on for physics. By me, art can deliver new points of view but not new knowledge. The arts are endlessly interesting – what a monkey wants to see most is another monkey – but their function is to help us dream free of our cage, and to give the artist that illusion of purpose that keeps him alive.
  We’re just out of the trees, and full of bush devils who will destroy us if we don’t give them something to do with their hands. Art keeps our demons from tearing us to rags. Whatever comes after us will have no demons and no art.
  
• Every photo is abstract, an abstraction of reality, a thing. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” and all that. Easy to forget, when you’re looking at a photo of a mountain, that you’re not looking at the mountain. 19th-century critics remarked that there was all the difference in the world between a painting of a nude and a photograph of a (blush) naked lady. Photographers should remind themselves often that what counts is the photo itself.