These people live again in print as intensely as when these images were captured on the old dry plates of sixty years ago....I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. And they in turn seem to be aware of me. - Ansel Adams (from the Preface to Jacob A. Riis : Photographer & Citizen ,1974)
Photographers operating within the terms of Surrealist sensibility, with its emphasis on the poetry of the unconscious, seem at first to be at odds with the concept of attaining a heightened sense of reality instead of in fact escaping it. La Revolution Surrealiste, a publication by Surrealists in Paris between 1924 and 1929, known to be consistently scandalous, culturally radical and revolutionary, contained documentary style photographs by Eugene Atget, made for different ends but later discovered to be examples of unconscious Surrealism. Very soon, the Surrealists came more broadly to view Atget's deserted cityscape as images of a haunted urban environment pregnant with possibilities. The physical process of picture taking was simultaneously used for recording everyday reality while probing beneath its surface to reveal new possibilities of meaning. In his unintentional modern approach to photography, Atget's urban scenes - featuring snatched glimpses, tangential perspectives, odd reflections and bizarre details convey a distinct perspective, and one which Walter Benjamin later described as how they operated beyond their ostensible purpose appearing uncannily like a 'scene of crime'. Similar photography enthusiasts of that era went to the extent of suggesting the vanity of even trying to understand the world and instead, proposing that we 'collect it' - in photographs. Atget's images of vanished Paris were understood not as the work of a self conscious professional artist, but as spontaneous visions of an urban primitive, and in his photographs of the deserted streets of old Paris and in shop windows haunted by elegant mannequins , as the Metropolitan Museum describes it - the Surrealists recognized their own vision of the city as a "dream capital", an urban labyrinth of memory and desire.
While breaching on this topic, and in learning it as an aesthetics that yearns to be a politics(typically a bourgeois disaffection), I'd like to draw attention to the inherent fascination in our minds with the underdog - an unexplored reality - and one in search for "real" places and faces. Bleak factory buildings and billboard cluttered avenues look as beautiful, even more so, by modern taste, as pristine landscapes and royal castles. Walter Benjamin talked about the power of the camera of transfiguring a tenement or a rubbish heap, not to mention a river dam or an electric cable factory ; in front of these, photography can only say 'How beautiful... It has succeeded in turning abject poverty itself, by handling it in a modish, technically perfect way, into an object of enjoyment'. Similarly, cinematic realization of beauty generally sought in people among the anonymous, the poor, the aged, the insane and the downtrodden or the oppressed, attributes ordinarily to a painful, sometimes nightmarish reality out there of destitution, atrocity, war , penury such labels as "terrific" , "fascinating" , "sensational" , "incredible" in appreciation of its photographic form. An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving or "beautiful" since it has been dignified with the intentness of the photographer. Susan Sontag talks of "The lovely composition and elegant perspective of Lewis Hine's photographs of exploited children in turn-of-the-century American mills and mines easily outlast the relevance of their subject matter. Protected middle-class inhabitants of the more affluent corners of the world - those regions where most photographs are taken and consumed- learn about the world's horrors mainly through the camera : photographs can and do distress. But the aestheticizing tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by neutralizing it", she says.
Though the expectations that photography has sought to satisfy have been largely aesthetic, this in no way negates the real and important information it gives about the world in the name of truth. It serves a dual-pronged approach in this manner, and though they are fascinated by social heights, photojournalists have for the entire last century hovered about the oppressed in their attendance with a spectacularly good conscience. The photographs that W.Eugene Smith took in the late 1960's in the Japanese fishing village of Minamata, most of whole inhabitants are crippled and slowly dying of mercury poisoning due to untreated waste dumped by an acetaldehyde production plant, move us because they document a suffering which arouses our indignation , but also distance us because in conformance with surrealist standards of beauty, they are superb photographs of Agony . Outside that, Eugene's portrait of Minimata is an impassioned tale of environmental destruction, corporate neglect and social responsibility. He documented Minamata with a hope that "if humankind ever decides to assume true responsibility for its stewardship of this planet" that we may realize "that industry has no divine right to pollute in the name of gross national product". And so from a utilitarian standpoint, it could be argued that while real people are out there killing other real people, or even themselves, the photographer stays behind the camera, creating vignettes in an image-world that promises to outlast them all. Of course, activities such as war photography inherently combine voyeurism with danger. Combat photographers cannot avoid participating in the lethal activity they record - the terrified cameraman crawling on his hands and knees past the makeshift trench of Israeli soldiers in Waltz with Bashir (albeit just ahead of the fearless and upright Ron Ben Yishai !) comes to mind immediately.
While Walter Benjamin in his groundbreaking essay Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction argues that art is aesthetically devaluedwhen it is mechanically reproduced, as in the case of photography(leading to shattering of the aura), he concedes it having given rise to a radically transformative and different mode of perception. Photography offers to the consciousness modes of reality that would remain in the unconscious without its action: "It is through photography that we discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis". Part of this characteristic mystique can be attributed to the relation between the art of photography and the presumption of veracity it carries, triggering debates on its experiments with realism, surrealism and abstraction. Sontag very comprehensively explores the various aspects of photography's nature in her 1977 book On Photography where she insists that the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. And that although there is a sense in which the camera indeed captures reality, not just interpret it, photographs are just as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are, she says.
In chasing realism or finding it applicable in our daily lives, I am one to be foremost in ascribing to Plato's allegory of the cave, not because the concept has endured for all these centuries and can so fancifully be interpreted in a number of ways (Matrix, Batman - you name it ), but because I am palpably aware that I am blind to the fact that anything exists beyond the cave - my cave - and the reality of such phenomena as war , astronomy , shark diving - the list of exotic realities is endless, is to be found only in photographs - true, insofar as they resemble what the world at large considers real, sham because they are no more than resemblances - a Platonic depreciation of the image, and mere shadows on the wall. However, Sontag spins a refreshingly different take on this by opposing the traditional image-free way of apprehending the real and strengthening the allegiance to images, and to realities understood to be images, and not just realities understood in the form of images. She views that the modern man is not to regard the image as a real thing; in fact photographic images are hardly that real. Instead, she argues that reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras. It is common now for people to insist about their experience of a violent event in which they were caught-up - a plane crash, a shoot-out, a terrorist bombing - that "it seems like a movie". This is said, other descriptions seeming insufficient, in order to explain how real it was. Hence, the powers of photography have in effect de-Platonized our understanding of reality, making it less and less plausible to reflect upon our life experiences according to the distinction between images and things. It suited Plato's derogatory attitude towards images to liken them to shadows - transitory, minimally informative, immaterial, impotent co-presences of the real things which cast them. But the force of photographic images comes from their being material realities in their own right, richly informative deposits left in the wake of whatever emitted them, potent means for turning the tables on reality - for turning it into a shadow, according to Sontag.
In direct retaliation to the formalist ideals of beauty and their implied consequences on our understanding of realism, lies the optimism of the modern age in inspiring a reevaluation of the photography of the past. For Diane Arbus, the American photographer known for her voyeuristic approach towards strange and obscurely troubling subject matters, both freaks and Middle America were equally exotic. She showed people who were retarded, slack-jawed, vacant, drooling , uncoordinated, demented-looking . They are standing or sitting stiffly, looking straight into the camera, making them look even stranger, odd , askew. Daniel Oppenheimer , in analyzing the public fascination with her photographs which became archetypes for depicting suburban ennui and seamy concerns of the downtrodden and marginal in the 1960's reveals that -The shock of her photos is in part that they suggest to us that were Arbus standing before us with her camera, we wouldn't perform much better, and that therefore, perhaps, we're as miserable as the woman on the park bench, as freakish as the transvestite in curlers (who at least is aware of, and in dialogue with, his freakhood). Additionally Sontag in her detailed analysis in America, Seen through photographs Darkly points that "Arbus's photographs undercut politics ... by suggesting a world in which everybody is alien, hopelessly isolated, immobilized in mechanical, crippled identities and relationships". Her work shows people who are pathetic, pitiable, repulsive, but it does not arouse any compassionate feelings. The subject of Arbus's photographs is, to borrow the Hegelian label, "the unhappy consciousness". Arbus felt that there was a quality of legend about freaks. In revealing her adoration for that segment of society, she used to say "Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats". Sontag talks of Arbus in that she photographed people in varying degree of unconscious or unaware relation to their pain, their ugliness. Most characters in her photos however appear not to know that they are ugly.
We seem to harbor a fairly modish notion of embellishment - that beauty is not inherent in anything; it is to be found, by another way of seeing - as well as a wider notion of meaning, which photography's many uses illustrate and powerfully reinforce. Poverty is no less interesting than riches; a portrait of an individual clad in slipshod rags is no less surreal than a princess dressed for a promenade. What makes something interesting is usually(but not restricted to) the fact that it can viewed as analogous or akin to, something else - and serves therefore as a powerful visual literary reference or allegory. Sontag talks of it as an art and that there are fashions of seeing things in order to make them interesting, requiring a steady recycling of the imagery and tastes of the past. To have gone from the tough-minded photographs of Depression squalor and city slum dwellers to swanky architectures and stylish luminaries over the years seems a very long journey indeed. But there is nothing inconsistent in these contrasts, in fact an inadvertent complementarity prevails. In her words, "traveling between degraded and glamorous realities is part of the very momentum of photographic enterprise". The photographer's reverence has made these images interesting ; time has made them heartfelt, substantive,all too human.
You can photograph anything now - Robert Frank