Foto-Gestalt 2019

published in the February/March 2019 issue of Aufbau magazine

Medium in Crisis: Narcissus in the Pond

At the age of 17, photography provided me with a license to actively engage with the world in a revelatory manner previously unknown to me.  I was taking a summer course with noted photographer Larry Fink in Martha’s Vineyard and hungrily ate up every pronouncement explicated from this charismatic beatnik.  According to Fink, the medium was about experience and empathy, not about passive voyeurism. It was not about being a hunter and souvenir gatherer, but about the exchange and interplay between photographer and subject. The camera was a tool for learning and self-knowledge, however the photographs, once exposed, might result in more questions than answers. The camera’s revelatory power was that it could be used for discovery rather than the facile and propagandistic purpose of proving a point. From the photographic adventure, there was the possibility of bringing back something others might appreciate, but that was a bit beside the point. This philosophy was a paradigm shift that transformed the way I considered the art making process and put me on my life’s path. 

The almost spiritual nature of the medium’s potential as explained to me on that New England island in 1985 still seduces me and engages my picture making today. The years that followed, however, have radically changed the way that photography operates in the world. The journey that I have personally taken from student to practitioner to teacher has been colored by radical developments in both the culture and the technology of the medium.  The Digital Age has brought both wondrous benefits as well as disappointing transgressions to the art form, as well as to my personal practice. The idealistic vision of photography touted to me in my youth can still be found in the work of some contemporary artists, but overwhelmingly, the mainstream culture has moved away from this humanistic impulse and taken the medium into the void of narcissism.

Digital technology has been wondrous in the resulting democratization of the photographic medium.  Not only do more individuals have access to the art form of photography, but mobile cameras are now being used as a simple and useful tool by large numbers of the population. Like any man-made tool, however, its use depends on its user. Just like the pen, a shopping list, love poem, or declaration of war are all options. Commonplace in our current day-to-day experience of photography is the pervasive selfie. On the street, on the subway, in the elevator, I notice this impulse everywhere. A child of social media, the selfie can be seen as Narcissus not only looking at his reflection, but falling into the pool. Related to this repetitive capturing of the self is the monotonous recording of things and moments. Rather than heightening an experience and using the camera as a tool to go deeper, this activity usually appears to be performed as a stand-in for actual experience. Thinking more about the posting and bragging, the present moment is lost and the trophy is hollow. Food, concerts, clothes, and travel are all fodder for the self-reflexive posting obsessed.  

This past New Year’s Eve, for example, I found myself on a NYC rooftop with friends and strangers. Rain and fog skewered the midnight fireworks display. But despite this, the revelers that surrounded me held up their mobile devices to desperately try and document the barely visible light show located beyond a tall building that further blocked its full recognition. Behind me in the dark, two 30-somethings preened in various poses taking selfies to prove they were there. Holding up a panda umbrella at various angles and then a Champagne glass, smiles were mandatory.  

The selfie has become a bragging rite that often showcases the aspiration or attainment of fame or wealth. This mode of photography is quite different from the casual family snapshots or hobbyist photography prevalent decades ago with film photography. The snapshot modality for the most part was bearing witness with a certain casual intimacy. The selfie more often than not reflects vanity at a level never before captured in the visual culture. This type of photography is certainly a very far cry from the Socratic impulse still espoused by Larry Fink, a professor at Bard College. When I myself recently taught photography, I had to work against the students’ assumption that a selfie reflects the goal of portraiture. When teaching studio lighting, students initially camped the same preening poses used for the typical toothy selfies. My goal in teaching portraiture is to lead the students of today towards an appreciation that a true portrait goes beyond the superficial vanity and disposable value of the selfie.  

The monolithic intrusion of social media selfies upon the way we function and perceive reality is a result of a 20-year journey through a digital revolution. In 1991, I entered an MFA program at New York’s School of Visual Arts. The then recently-launched graduate program in Photography and Related Media was founded by Charles Traub, who had the foresight to make digital photography a signature focus. As an educator, Traub was ahead of the curve; the programs at Yale and RISD were at that point still solely film based. Photoshop had only just been released in 1990 and I was part of the first generation to take a course on the software. After the class, however, I promptly rejected digital. Unlike some of my fellow students, who used the floppy disk based Sony Mavica cameras as well as Photoshop, I was decidedly Luddite. At least for the moment.

A decade later, in 2000, I found myself drawn back to Photoshop when producing the first of three limited edition artist’s books, in which I converted film negatives in order to output the images as digital pigment prints. I was using the technology to control the means of production and distribution.  I found that the technology actually gave me more control of image manipulation and printing quality than I had experienced in the traditional darkroom. In addition, I could use beautiful fine art paper for my images, which was not an option in traditional photography.  

I was still shooting film, however, and it wasn’t until 2004 that I started experimenting with my first digital DSLR camera.  I found the results lackluster, though, and continued to use film. Since starting assignment work for The New York Timesin 1992, my editorial work was focused on capturing famous individuals at A-list events. This work crosses the line between the commercial and fine-art spheres. It was due to this particular sensibility that editors still allowed me to shoot film well into the millennium, when most other photographers were shooting digitally. In fact, I was able to shoot film for my multi-page features of New York Fashion Week for Women’s Wear Daily’sprinted magazine The Collectionsthrough 2010.  

By then however, it was clear from the publishing landscape that I would need to shift if I wanted to stay viable as an editorial photographer. So I pitched my editor at WWDa digital version of my coverage. I would shoot digitally (using a new mirrorless camera that suited my needs) and upload multiple posts throughout fashion week while including a first person written account of my observations. He loved the idea and confided that my pitch was prescient, as the printed magazine was folding and everythingwas now to be online. 

Although this arrangement was highly successful and resulted in eight more seasons of work, it was for me the end of an era. I had come of age in a time when print magazines hired photographers to create dynamic visuals in a variety of styles. The publications could be superficial for sure, but they could also be highly engaging. W Magazinehad hired me for two years in the 1990s to create a series of pictorials satirizing the rich & famous. This was pretty subversive stuff from a publication that otherwise fawned on socialites and wealth. In 1996, John F. Kennedy Jr.’s magazine George, commissioned me to photograph President Bill Clinton’s run for his second term as President. The writer was Norman Mailer. The publication hired us even though neither of us were traditional political journalists. Other publications such as the New York Times Magazinecould be equally as progressive. Larry Fink recently referred to those days as a golden age for photographers, and I agree.

Although the 1990s provided stellar opportunities for subversives such as Fink and myself, the importance that publications held in the culture had actually been in steep decline for decades. The picture magazine had actually reached its zenith in the mid-20^thcentury. At that time publications such as Look, Life, and Harper’s Bazaarwere on the cutting edge of showcasing creative photography. In 1940, when fascism was taking hold of Europe, PM Weeklypublished a series of photographs depicting decadent bourgeoisie lounging in Nice, France. This seminal body of work was shot by Fink’s mentor, Austrian emigre Lisette Model. Later that decade, Lifemagazine published an eye-opening picture essay by Gordon Parks depicting a Harlem gang leader. The pictorials that were showcased in picture magazines brought a world on the brink into people’s living rooms. By the mid 1960’s television was bringing nightly coverage of the Vietnam War into people’s homes and the picture magazine became obsolete. In 1978, Life magazine went from a weekly to a monthly and currently only remains in special editions often dedicated to dead celebrities. 

The current celebrity-focused incarnation of this once legendary photojournalistic news magazine should, in another way, come as no surprise. From at least the 1950s through the digital era of today, fame seems to have grown exponentially as a cultural obsession. In the 1990s as digital photography was developing, so was a cultural construct of reality as captured for television. MTV’s Real World series launched in 1992 and ignited a society that not only watches The Kardashians, but wants desperately to have the same kind of fame that this family achieved through the weekly broadcasting of their vacuous reality. We need only look at the current American President to see the end game of our current obsession with fame and its depiction.

For me to lambast the current state of celebrity culture might seem a bit hypocritical. After all, I’ve made a career and an artistic body of work based on this phenomenon.  The fact, however, is that I made the pictures as a form of social commentary. My ambition has always been to try and elevate society by holding a mirror up to its decadent excesses. At the present moment, the opportunity to make such pictures for public consumption have all but disappeared. Those with fame exerted their growing power and insisted on release forms and other methods of control. Publications and journalists for the most part acquiesced. Editors in turn seem to want images that are easily digested by their audience. Flattering, toothy, front and center shots of the celebrity that are the equivalent in psychological depth to any selfie found on Instagram.  

Although today I rarely see images that interest or provoke me in mainstream publications, I often see pictures on social media that certainly cross the line. When studying with Larry Fink, it was explained that while we photographers were in fact invading someone else’s personal space with our cameras, if we were committed to utilize the art form for a higher purpose we could transcend any possible transgression. Although I can’t quite recall any conversations about respect for the subject and decorum, I feel like that would have been an obvious if unspoken expectation. Not so anymore, it seems. A few years ago, I noticed on Facebook a rather disturbing post by an acquaintance. She had used her phone to photograph an Amish couple who were sleeping on an Amtrak train. The image had no pathos but showed them, disheveled, mouths open and unaware. The litany of comments on the post were both for and against this particular documentation of reality. The acquaintance freely admitted to knowing full well that the Amish, as a rule, do not allow themselves to be photographed. Despite this she felt it was her right to lean behind her seat and take the picture. I found her way of thinking problematic at best and certainly a sign of the times. 

The medium at this moment is multi-faceted for sure and, as always, in flux. As a society we are still looking to balance the freedom of expression with the right for privacy. I still believe photography is an immensely powerful tool for Socratic investigation. Along those lines there is still some wonderful work being made by important voices. In 2010, Rosalind Solomon along with 11 other internationally acclaimed photographers, spent time making pictures in Israel and the West Bank for a project entitled This Place. Solomon spent 5 months photographing many individuals in many locations and of all faiths. Carrying her trusted Hasselblad camera on this new adventure, she “saw and felt…informed by the unexpected.” The resulting images published in her 2014 monograph THEM, tap into the psyche of her subjects. This octogenarian, who is another former student of Lisette Model, still to this day shoots her work in film. Larry Fink on the other hand, has gone digital. Acclaimed for his square medium format flash-infused dramatically lit images, he has put his flash away and embraced the incredible light sensitivity of the recent generation of digital camera sensors. Photography is dead…long live photography.