foam magazine #21 / merge
interview
it’s not a mechanical age medium. It has the freedom of drawing, poetry, of meditation. It has as much freedom as the human spirit is capable of. So if you start with the human spirit – photography is an intermediary and an amplifier, and often a limitation as well – then you’re starting in a place where anything is possible. In my book I describe David Rokeby, who uses a camera to make music. He’ll use the camera to observe gestures and so on. The software is written to output it as music. I’d love to be able to photograph a demonstration, a political demonstration, and output it as music. Outputting it as music is a form of writing with light. I’m not limited to one idea of what photography needs to be. So in that sense, I can say that most photographic programs are using a very small set of possibilities within the photographic potentials and that the students themselves, I find, are generally much more open. They themselves are sets of possibilities and potentials. If they then meet a photography that is there to work with, to collaborate with them in this giant set of potentials, then you’re not only worried about the f/64 movement and Edward Weston or Pictorialism. You’re not always looking backward to fit into a tradition, which can be very reassuring, but you’re saying, what does it mean to be a human being? What does it mean to live on this planet? What does it mean to cohabit with the mammals? What do these things mean? And then photography at its best becomes, in a way, a song of the self and a song of the planet. You give your students a story by Julio Cortázar, show them Antonioni’s Blow-Up, and give them Don DeLillo’s White Noise to read. Isn’t that kind of heterodox for a photography professor? I don’t want students to say, oh, if I do it like Cartier-Bresson I’m a good photographer. I think what has to happen is that photographers understand, critically, that they’re able to read photographs and other media and ask questions like, what does it really do? What’s it about? How can it be interpreted differently? How can it be contextualized differently? This will then affect their own work. I’m trying to say to the students, look at these different approaches to photography, where is the authenticity? Where do you want to join in? If you’re going to be a commercial photographer in the sense that you’re going to commodify everything, well, what happened to Michel in Cortázar’s story was that he was able to better understand life and himself by interrogating the photographic process. So the act of photography is not one act. It’s not simply saying point the lens this way because that’s foolish. You don’t have to go to university to learn that. I can give anybody a camera and a 10-minute lesson and he’s a photographer. By assigning White Noise, the Don DeLillo novel, I’m posing questions about the overlay of image on so many aspects of daily life and the ways in which that overlay of image becomes a simulation, a simulacrum, a distortion, a commodity that becomes as important as air and water to so many people, a thing which we need to live. I often use an example from when I was a child. We went to the market and brought home tomatoes that were every shape and every color. They were bruised and marred but when you bit into one, it had an amazing taste and liquidity. It ran out of your mouth. You were in this place that the tomato brought you to – you were in the place of ‘tomato’. Now you go the market and all the tomatoes are the same color. They’re perfect – no blemishes – but they’ve become almost plastic and they have no taste. The image of the tomato has triumphed over the tomato itself.And I think that, similarly, image has largely suppressed the potential for any meaningful politics, because you have to look a certain way, you have to talk a certain way, to be an effective politician. The actual issues are often avoided. Image reigns.
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So you’re essentially planting these seeds in students so that they develop tools and skills? Students may think that they are entering this field and if they follow its traditions everything will be fine. Then you hear you’re at this extraordinary point in history where the possibilities and challenges have never been greater. It requires enormous confidence in your own intuitive abilities, your own belief in what’s authentic, to go and find pathways that are the most meaningful while knowing that we have all kinds of wonderful predecessors. But they are predecessors. You can’t necessarily do what other people did. You as an individual are going to have your own needs and aspirations. I remember interviewing Henri Cartier-Bresson and he told me that there are four important books to read. One was Zen and the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel. With all the flaws of the book and all the criticism, what I took away was how you, more or less, hit the target when you’re not really trying to hit the target, because if you try to hit the target, it’s much harder than if you don’t try to hit it. How do you catch a butterfly? You can run after one with a net or you can open the net and let it come to you. If you open the net and let it come to you, it means that you’re open to the butterfly, ready for it. You’re ready for life, you’re ready for the world, you’re ready for the spirit. To me that is the ‘decisive moment’ that Henri was talking about. What did we miss? What did I miss? Simply put, I think that photography, writing with light, is about looking for a space of illumination. It’s not really about a camera. +
Fred Ritchin is professor of photography and imaging at New York University. Previously the picture editor of the New York Times Magazine, executive editor of Camera Arts magazine, and founding director of the Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Program at the International Center of Photography, Ritchin has written and lectured internationally on media for many years. The author of In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography, his essays have also appeared in books such as In Our Time: The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers, Sahel: The End of the Road, and Under Fire; Great Photographers and Writers in Vietnam.
He is also director of PixelPress (pixelpress.org) an organization that
works at the intersection of new media, documentary and human rights, collaborating with humanitarian organizations on campaigns, for instance to wipe out polio or to advance the Millennium Development Goals. He lives with his family in New York City. Brian Palmer is an independent journalist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. Palmer has written for publications including Mother Jones, The Huffington Post, Pixel Press.org and ColorLines. He is on the faculty of The School of Visual Arts’ MFA Photography, Video, & Related Media Program in New York City. From 2000 to 2002 Palmer was an on-air correspondent at CNN. Prior to that he was a staff writer at Fortune and Beijing Bureau Chief for US News & World Report. He began his career in journalism in 1988 at The Village Voice newspaper. In 2008 he produced Full Disclosure, a documentary based on his embeds in Iraq with a US Marine infantry unit, for which he received grants from the Ford Foundation and the Applied Research Center. Mary Ellen Mark is an American photographer known for her documentary photography and her portraiture. She had has published 16 books and has been exhibited at galleries and museums worldwide. She has received numerous awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Dr. Erich Salomon Preis Award, and three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.