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| © Andrew Moore |
| Campoamor, Vista Este, Havana 1999. Click photo for a gallery of Andrew Moore's images. |
JC: I talked to Alec Soth about this already, and I'd like to ask you about it. There are many places or ideas which have become photographic clichés. For a photographer it might be one of the biggest challenges to avoid simply falling for the cliché trap. Would you agree that this problem exists, and -- if yes -- how do you deal with it?
AM: I believe that the problem of the cliché image is endemic to the making of art. One has only to look at the plethora of stagnant history paintings so favored by the art academies of the 19th century to see that the problem of the "subject" is a profound one faced by artists of all periods.
Our particular moment in time has compounded this problem through the massive overproduction of images. I am not saying that there should be less art, as a general principle, but because of our ever-improved technology, we are able to produce images at an overwhelming pace, and not only that, we are also able to distribute them with extraordinary speed. So it's no wonder that contemporary artists feel both overwhelmed and constrained given such a large-scale and efficient system of manufacture and distribution.
As an example of this, I recently brought to America my Russian assistant who had worked with me during my travels for the book. She shot for a month in America with me, and we traveled all over, from public swimming pools in East New York to ranches in the Sandhills of Nebraska. Whenever I asked her what she thought about these places, she said that nothing about them surprised her; she had already seen it all before in books, magazines, and movies. "You Americans have done a very good job of imaging yourselves," was her comment.
I agree that the United States may be one of the toughest places to shoot in terms of finding new subject matter. And it would seem to be one of the reasons why many photographic artists have turned away from an empirical approach in favor of a way of working that is more staged and suppositional.
However, as much as this dilemma does exist, I think there are two approaches that may help. The paradox is that one relies on technology, the other on history. Although some may feel that art and science share little in the way of sensibility, it's evident that perception and technology are intimately connected through the history of art, whether it is the discovery of mathematical perspective, the developments of oil paint in tubes (hence plein-air painting), or large-scale digital photography. The question becomes, what can we do today that couldn't be done twenty, ten, or even five years ago? What new ways do we have of seeing the world? I don't believe this is an end in itself, but it certainly is one means for an artist to create a refreshed vision of things. I find the best solution is to embrace the entire spectrum of possibilities, from the most traditional methods to the latest and newest techniques, in order to have the widest palette available for my work.
The other approach involves a deepened understanding of history, both the history of image making and the overall flow and pattern of events that have created today's world. It's not simply a question of finding a new angle, but of seeing the world as it is evolving today. My sense is that our perception of the world, as influenced by the rapid evolution of information technology, directs us away from history and the past. It's as though we view reality through a speeding car: the future, which is rushing toward us, appears immediate and vivid, while the past, which can only be viewed through the mirror, falls away into blurriness and quickly vanishes. I believe that if artists are engaged with the past, in whatever manner they choose, it can facilitate the ability to see a continuum between previous forms and the yet evolving contemporary ones. And if the dilemma of the cliché ultimately turns on the act of perception, then anything that helps the artist to see his/her subject in the state of "becoming" (and once formalized, permits the viewer to "re-perceive" this subject) is indeed a valuable tool.
JC: The one thing that surprises me about this development, though, is the following: You would imagine that all these new "information technologies" would remove our ignorance of other places and even our own history, but I just don't see that happening. I often think of photographic clichés as stereotypes that have become pictures. As a German, the things that I most commonly get to hear is that Germans make good beer and tools, have no sense of humor, and take boring photographs. And it is just so tempting to look for what you already know, and very hard to find something else. Coming back to your role as a teacher again, is this something that can be taught? Or does every photographer have to find it for him -- or herself?
AM: Intellectual curiosity, in itself, just like an innate sense of proportion, can probably not be taught. One would hope, as a teacher, to develop in students an attitude toward learning, toward acquiring knowledge, and toward the sense of connectivity in everything they do.
Emmet Gowin, a master teacher, calls this "the quality of attention": it means developing an attitude in which everything you do, all the way from how you treat a piece of photographic paper, to how you behave with those you dislike, reflects at the deepest level the way you respect yourself. And I've always thought this was true, that the best teachers don't insist on particular techniques and methods, but instead nurture an attitude and way of understanding oneself.
That said, I admit to be being a true believer in science and technology. I think the greatest miracle of the modern world is that we can open up our sleek laptops and through the ether itself, connect to the entirety of human knowledge, mistakes and all. On the flip side are the innumerable and everyday challenges of living in this complex, contradictory, and over stimulated system we've made for ourselves. Since unplugging is not really an option, except for the Luddites who can live in the forest and make tintypes, what we need at this point is a new model of reality. One branch of mathematics, which has metaphorical possibilities for what this new mental picture might look like, is something called Graph Theory. (This theory has made invaluable contributions to contemporary computer science and is popularized in such notions as six degrees of separation.) It deals with a mesh of points in space containing multitudinous connections and how best to transfer information from one point to another in this system. It's stable yet flexible, organized but not traditionally hierarchical, and reflects as accurately as any model I know the manner in which we both receive information and navigate through our contemporary surroundings.
JC: I've recently heard quite a few complaints that contemporary photography has to too much an extent internalized what people believe to be the German school (which, in itself, I think, is largely a stereotype). It is said that there are too many photos with empty, drab scenes, portraits have become too detached, etc. Has contemporary photography become too "cold"?
AM: I think this is a most relevant question. Surely the success, especially in the marketplace, of the "Düsseldorf School," has encouraged photographers in the belief that objective photography is the best means to deal with our complex and contradictory world, and that more intuitive or lyrical approaches lead to a worldview that is out of sync or even nostalgic.
The great value of the German school is that its practitioners continue to look outward, to examine the world empirically, in opposition to the inward-turning, constructed set-ups that have dominated in recent American photography. That said, "objective photography," as practiced by the Germans and influenced by a typological tradition which runs through Sander and the Bechers, is an intellectual distillation of reality through a precise definition of types and categories. I would say that this way of looking at the world is fundamentally Aristotelian, and it is highly effective when practiced with discipline, as the Germans have, and during periods lacking clarity and definition, which seems to be where we are now. (Perhaps it is not surprising that August Sander created his types during the disorder of the Weimar years.) Even the most intuitive of the German photographers, Thomas Struth, creates thematic unity through this typological approach.
It is interesting to note that the set-up/tableaux approach, with its conceptual roots in performance art and appropriation, often employs romantic themes (lost love, the pangs of adolescence, virginal innocence, the isolated genius, etc). However, these themes are almost always held at arm's length, and admixed with irony and/or an emotional remoteness. So in a sense, both schools end up feeling a bit cold, although approached from different points of view.
For myself, I am trying to synthesize many of these threads in contemporary photography to approach what might be called "conceptual realism." As an American artist, some of this is rooted in 19th-century American painting and the empiricism of a thinker such as Thoreau, who saw the material world as the final expression of the spiritual, and not merely a stepping-stone to some higher level. As the poet William Carlos Williams once wrote, there are "No ideas but in things." If you look at an early work by the painter George Caleb Bingham, such as "Fur Traders Descending the Missouri"(1845), you can see both the empirical and the visionary qualities harmonized together. So I believe that if contemporary photographers are to cast off the "coldness" of both conceptualism and the typological, they have to keep their eyes on the physical world about them, and at the same time see it as a manifestation of something much larger and mythological.
-- Jörg Colberg is founder and editor of the fine-art photography blog Conscientious. He works as a research scientist at Carnegie-Mellon University.
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