The Photographer Goes Back to Basics

 

If you pressed me, now. If I were honest, a photographic career is, basically, just like any other, with different tools and products. It fluctuates, you know? You move from the zeal of the capture, the feeling that your point of view (POV) might be “special” or “unique” – and it is – it’s one-of-a-kind even when one is copying someone else, still a translation or a version, not a “same.” You get over the miraculous. It wears off with time. Inattention, a zillion images from a million Kodaks, Polaroids and Nikons, and the clicker just feels overwrought, or miniscule, inundated and insignificant.

So you join a cause or a team, a kind of “group POV.” You figure there’s strength in numbers, you can at least make a digit’s difference, someone else cares or shares or might be helped by what you do, who you notice, how you work. But that film plays out as well, being as how everyone in the “group POV’ can’t ever actually escape their individual POVs, it ain’t long before you each understand a “place” or a “role,” an “effect” you come to feel is replaceable, or that you could as well perform that function on your own. Cut and splice. Disappear.

Now sometimes a kind of “back-to-square-one” occurs here – or a sensation of discovery that’s nearly always re-discovering, which is just fine. You pay a little more attention to your tools, try old ones, new ones, mix up the chemicals, collage the exposures, experiment surfaces and pages. You plunge the medium, see if something ain’t been missed or never combined, used just so, at this or that time, this or that way. When you look hard enough (if you care, that is) – you’ll find it. Someone’s been there, thought it, shot it, used it, what-not.

Then you might try plumbing your individuality – family roots or land, self-portraits, things you figure only you have access to; or you try some wild novelty – work for no other reason than to try what you haven’t seen tried, usually the results are ridiculous, maybe some cool accidents, but very rarely anything world-shaking or earth-shattering comes of it, more like play. Banality and/or play. Too finite or too abstract. Solipsistic or anonymous.

At this point, usually 20 years in or so, give or take decades, many sell out. Either by doing “well enough,” using their skills developed for someone else’s purposes, or literally unloading the shebang on Craigslist or gifting it to a young idealist upstart or relative; or you teach.

Others of us simply scale down. By which I mean you return to the basics, by which I mean you figure out through all the efforts, jobs, mechanisms and situations, what actually pleased you. What gave you the willies the highs the joys the thuds about being and doing…and you figure out, at whatever level of notoriety or negligence, how you can keep on doing these things.

You look, and you feel. What you like feeling looking you make pictures of. Could be people’s faces, secret subway shots; could be getting yourself off to remote places – mountains, trees; could be naked women or men; innocent children; dangerous wars. Could be proximity to the rich and famous; or microscopic lives of plants or insects; could be the chemicals and lights themselves, the materials – blurs, slurs, Rorschach-like concoctions. Only you know, ‘cause you’re the one that feels it when you look.

Hell I’ve been a grocery bagger, an insurance peddler, kindergarten teacher and garbage man, just to see the chaos of shapes and light, just to rove the streets to or from with my “magic box.” You’ll know if you gotta. You’ll even know what you’ve gotta.

I gotta.

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