On Photography (12 page)

Weston’s notion of the photographer’s agon shares many themes with the heroic vitalism of the 1920s popularized by D. H. Lawrence: affirmation of the sensual life, rage at bourgeois sexual hypocrisy, self-righteous defense of egotism in the service of one’s spiritual vocation, manly appeals for a union with nature. (Weston calls photography “a way of self-development, a means to discover and identify oneself with all the manifestations of basic forms—with nature, the source.”) But while Lawrence wanted to restore the wholeness of sensory appreciation, the photographer—even one whose passions seem so reminiscent of Lawrence’s—necessarily insists on the preeminence of one sense: sight. And, contrary to what Weston asserts, the habit of photographic seeing—of looking at reality as an array of potential photographs—creates estrangement from, rather than union with, nature.

Photographic seeing, when one examines its claims, turns out to be mainly the practice of a kind of dissociative seeing, a subjective habit which is reinforced by the objective discrepancies between the way that the camera and the human eye focus and judge perspective. These discrepancies were much remarked by the public in the early days of picture-taking. Once they began to think photographically, people stopped talking about photographic distortion, as it was called. (Now, as William Ivins, Jr., has pointed out, they actually hunt for that distortion.) Thus, one of the perennial successes of photography has been its strategy of turning living beings into things, things into living beings. The peppers Weston photographed in 1929 and 1930 are voluptuous in a way that his female nudes rarely are. Both the nudes and the pepper are photographed for the play of forms—but the body is characteristically shown bent over upon itself, all the extremities cropped, with the flesh rendered as opaque as normal lighting and focus allow, thus decreasing its sensuality and heightening the abstractness of the body’s form; the pepper is viewed close-up but in its entirety, the skin polished or oiled, and the result is a discovery of the erotic suggestiveness of an ostensibly neutral form, a heightening of its seeming palpability.

It was the beauty of forms in industrial and scientific photography that dazzled the Bauhaus designers, and, indeed, the camera has recorded few images more interesting formally than those taken by metallurgists and crystallographers. But the Bauhaus approach to photography has not prevailed. No one now considers the beauty revealed in photographs to be epitomized by scientific microphotography. In the main tradition of the beautiful in photography, beauty requires the imprint of a human decision: that
this
would make a good photograph, and that the good picture would make some comment. It proved more important to reveal the elegant form of a toilet bowl, the subject of a series of pictures Weston did in Mexico in 1925, than the poetic magnitude of a snowflake or a coal fossil.

For Weston, beauty itself was subversive—as seemed confirmed when some people were scandalized by his ambitious nudes. (In fact, it was Weston—followed by Andre Kertesz and Bill Brandt—who made nude photography respectable.) Now photographers are more likely to emphasize the ordinary humanity of their revelations. Though photographers have not ceased to look for beauty, photography is no longer thought to create, under the aegis of beauty, a psychic breakthrough. Ambitious modernists, like Weston and Cartier-Bresson, who understand photography as a genuinely new way of seeing (precise, intelligent, even scientific), have been challenged by photographers of a later generation, like Robert Frank, who want a camera eye that is not piercing but democratic, who don’t claim to be setting new standards for seeing. Weston’s assertion that “photography has opened the blinds to a new world vision” seems typical of the overoxygenated hopes of modernism in all the arts during the first third of the century—hopes since abandoned.

Although the camera did make a psychic revolution, it was hardly in the positive, romantic sense that Weston envisaged.

Insofar as photography does peel away the dry wrappers of habitual seeing, it creates another habit of seeing: both intense and cool, solicitous and detached; charmed by the insignificant detail, addicted to incongruity. But photographic seeing has to be constantly renewed with new shocks, whether of subject matter or technique, so as to produce the impression of violating ordinary vision. For, challenged by the revelations of photographers, seeing tends to accommodate to photographs. The avant-garde vision of Strand in the twenties, of Weston in the late twenties and early thirties, was quickly assimilated. Their rigorous close-up studies of plants, shells, leaves, time-withered trees, kelp, driftwood, eroded rocks, pelicans' wings, gnarled cypress roots, and gnarled workers’ hands have become cliches of a merely photographic way of seeing. What it once took a very intelligent eye to see, anyone can see now. Instructed by photographs, everyone is able to visualize that once purely literary conceit, the geography of the body: for example, photographing a pregnant woman so that her body looks like a hillock, a hillock so that it looks like the body of a pregnant woman.

Increased familiarity does not entirely explain why certain conventions of beauty get used up while others remain. The attrition is moral as well as perceptual. Strand and Weston could hardly have imagined how these notions of beauty could become so banal, yet it seems inevitable once one insists—as Weston did—on so bland an ideal of beauty as perfection. Whereas the painter, according to Weston, has always “tried to improve nature by self-imposition,” the photographer has “proved that nature offers an endless number of perfect ‘compositions,’—order everywhere.” Behind the modernist’s belligerent stance of aesthetic purism lay an astonishingly generous acceptance of the world. For Weston, who spent most of his photographic life on the California coast near Carmel, the Walden of the 1920s, it was relatively easy to find beauty and order, while for Aaron Siskind, a photographer of the generation after Strand and a New Yorker, who began his career by taking architectural photographs and genre photographs of city people, the question is one of creating order. “When I make a photograph,” Siskind writes, “I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order.” For Cartier-Bresson, to take photographs is “to find the structure of the world—to revel in the pure pleasure of form,” to disclose that “in all this chaos, there is order.” (It may well be impossible to talk about the perfection of the world without sounding unctuous.) But displaying the perfection of the world was too sentimental, too a historical a notion of beauty to sustain photography. It seems inevitable that Weston, more committed than Strand ever was to abstraction, to the discovery of forms, produced a much narrower body of work than Strand did. Thus Weston never felt moved to do socially conscious photography and, except for the period between 1923 and 1927 that he spent in Mexico, shunned cities. Strand, like Cartier-Bresson, was attracted to the picturesque desolations and damages of urban life. But even far from nature, both Strand and Cartier-Bresson (one could also cite Walker Evans) still photograph with the same fastidious eye that discerns order everywhere.

The view of Stieglitz and Strand and Weston—that photographs should be, first of all, beautiful (that is, beautifully composed)—seems thin now, too obtuse to the truth of disorder: even as the optimism about science and technology which lay behind the Bauhaus view of photography seems almost pernicious. Weston's images, however admirable, however beautiful, have become less interesting to many people, while those taken by the mid-nineteenth-century English and French primitive photographers and by Atget, for example, enthrall more than ever. The judgment of Atget as “not a fine technician” that Weston entered in his
Daybooks
perfectly reflects the coherence of Weston's view and his distance from contemporary taste. “Halation destroyed much, and the color correction not good,” Weston notes; “his instinct for subject matter was keen, but his recording weak,—his construction inexcusable, so often one feels he missed the real thing.” Contemporary taste faults Weston, with his devotion to the perfect print, rather than Atget and the other masters of photography’s demotic tradition. Imperfect technique has come to be appreciated precisely because it breaks the sedate equation of Nature and Beauty. Nature has become more a subject for nostalgia and indignation than an object of contemplation, as marked by the distance of taste which separates both the majestic landscapes of Ansel Adams (Weston’s best-known disciple) and the last important body of photographs in the Bauhaus tradition, Andreas Feininger’s
The Anatomy of Nature
(1965), from current photographic imagery of nature defiled.

As these formalist ideals of beauty seem, in retrospect, linked to a certain historical mood, optimism about the modern age (the new vision, the new era), so the decline of the standards of photographic purity represented by both Weston and the Bauhaus school has accompanied the moral letdown experienced in recent decades. In the present historical mood of disenchantment one can make less and less sense out of the formalist’s notion of timeless beauty. Darker, time-bound models of beauty have become prominent, inspiring a reevaluation of the photography of the past; and, in an apparent revulsion against the Beautiful, recent generations of photographers prefer to show disorder, prefer to distill an anecdote, more often than not a disturbing one, rather than isolate an ultimately reassuring “simplified form” (Weston’s phrase). But notwithstanding the declared aims of indiscreet, unposed, often harsh photography to reveal truth, not beauty, photography still beautifies. Indeed, the most enduring triumph of photography has been its aptitude for discovering beauty in the humble, the inane, the decrepit. At the very least, the real has a pathos. And that pathos is—beauty. (The beauty of the poor, for example.)

Weston’s celebrated photograph of one of his fiercely loved sons, “Torso of Neil,” 1925, seems beautiful because of the shapeliness of its subject and because of its bold composition and subtle lighting—a beauty that is the result of skill and taste. Jacob Riis’s crude flashlit photographs taken between 1887 and 1890 seem beautiful because of the force of their subject, grimy shapeless New York slum-dwellers of indeterminate age, and because of the rightness of their “wrong” framing and the blunt contrasts produced by the lack of control over tonal values—a beauty that is the result of amateurism or inadvertence. The evaluation of photographs is always shot through with such aesthetic double standards. Initially judged by the norms of painting, which assume conscious design and the elimination of nonessentials, the distinctive achievements of photographic seeing were until quite recently thought to be identical with the work of that relatively small number of photographers who, through reflection and effort, managed to transcend the camera's mechanical nature to meet the standards of art. But it is now clear that there is no inherent conflict between the mechanical or naive use of the camera and formal beauty of a very high order, no kind of photograph in which such beauty could not turn out to be present: an unassuming functional snapshot may be as visually interesting, as eloquent, as beautiful as the most acclaimed fine-art photographs. This democratizing of formal standards is the logical counterpart to photography's democratizing of the notion of beauty. Traditionally associated with exemplary models (the representative art of the classical Greeks showed only youth, the body in its perfection), beauty has been revealed by photographs as existing everywhere. Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.

For photographers there is, finally, no difference—no greater aesthetic advantage—between the effort to embellish the world and the counter-effort to rip off its mask. Even those photographers who disdained retouching their portraits—a mark of honor for ambitious portrait photographers from Nadar on—tended to protect the sitter in certain ways from the camera’s too revealing gaze. And one of the typical endeavors of portrait photographers, professionally protective toward famous faces (like Garbo’s) which really are ideal, is the search for “real” faces, generally sought among the anonymous, the poor, the socially defenseless, the aged, the insane—people indifferent to (or powerless to protest) the camera’s aggressions. Two portraits that Strand did in 1916 of urban casualties, “Blind Woman” and “Man,” are among the first results of this search conducted in close-up. In the worst years of the German depression Helmar Lerski made a whole compendium of distressing faces, published under the title
Kopfe des Alltags (Everyday Faces)
in 1931. The paid models for what Lerski called his “objective character studies”—with their rude revelations of over-enlarged pores, wrinkles, skin blemishes—were out-of-work servants procured from an employment exchange, beggars, street sweepers, vendors, and washerwomen.

The camera can be lenient; it is also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste. Thus, while fashion photography is based on the fact that something can be more beautiful in a photograph than in real life, it is not surprising that some photographers who serve fashion are also drawn to the non-photogenic. There is a perfect complementarity between Avedon's fashion photography, which flatters, and the work in which he comes on as The One Who Refuses to Flatter—for example, the elegant, ruthless portraits Avedon did in 1972 of his dying father. The traditional function of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as an art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias.