I am reading Stephen Shore’s new book Modern Instances and I want to explain to you why Stephen Shore is a bad photographer. Just kidding, he’s the best, this is about something else entirely.
Early on in the book he shares a crime scene photograph of a murder victim taken by a police officer. The photograph is pretty stunning. Only after reading on did I consider that the officer had done a terrible job taking a crime scene photo. Shore starts thinking through the decision process of the photographer, before conceding that they were probably not making aesthetic decisions as he would, but rather thinking like a cop: include as much as possible, document evidence, etc, they just screwed it up and made an interesting photo instead.
Years ago a girlfriend of mine brought out a box full of photographs taken by her grandfather. Like a lot of our grandfathers, he had spent a portion of the 1940s fighting Nazis. I don’t remember exactly where he was stationed, but from the landscapes and architecture of the photos, I think it was Italy. What I do remember about the prints was that there were a lot of them and that they were bad. I looked through hundreds of his bad photographs. He embraced the spray-and-pray method like he was shooting digitally (and had all the time in the world to edit). He had a real knack for missing a moment. I could often see what he was going for, he just couldn’t get it. There was, however, one exception. I saw it in the stack and I knew immediately that it was great. It was a photo of a soldier leaning out of the window of a train. The details are now a little foggy but I think he was engaging with some other soldiers on the platform. I wish I’d asked to take a photo of it myself, or even tracked down the negative if possible. Anyway, if you had shown me just that print, and told me that there were hundreds more by this unknown American soldier/photographer, I’d have said we might have another Vivian Maier-type secret genius on our hands. Or, if someone showed it to me and said “Hey look at this Walker Evans photo” I’d have said “Yes, that is an excellent Walker Evans photo”. It was a GREAT photograph, amongst a sea of bad.
So here are these two incredibly different ways that two really good photographs were made. I’ve been thinking about them a lot, because sometimes I can get in my head about the process of photography, thinking about all of the different ways I could/should be making pictures. Of course, the answer is that there is no one way that I “should” be making them.
I’m going to continue to remind myself of these photos because good art can and will forever be made in a million different ways. I’ll take photos and if I do it differently every day, it doesn’t matter. The good ones will come, and so will the bad.
Travis
While writing this I was listening to the Art+Math Jazz Primer that
posted a few weeks ago. It is good. I like it.
Food for thought as always Travis, and now that I have a mental image of the train station photo I really want to see the real thing to compare the two.
We have to get through the bad to find the good.
Interesting piece, Travis.