My favorite story is about a ceramics professor who splits his students in their final year into two groups and tells one half to produce just one piece of work (and make it amazing!) and the other half that their final mark will be based solely on the weight of their work.

The first group are mostly petrified and come up with next to nothing and the second set (who are mass producing any old crap, as long as it’s heavy) happen to produce some amazing work along the way.

–designer Jamie Keenan speaking with Pablo Delcan in Lit Hub

On the same theme as the previous quote about fiction and nonfiction, I came across this letter from the kitsch photographer Ansel Adams to the legendary New Deal FSA journalist Dorothea Lange (both of them being co-founders of Aperture) and while I don’t entirely agree, I found it helpful in considering the ever-timely tensions he raises to her attention. A portion of it follows:

Dear Dorothea,

…We DO love you even if we disagree with you documentary-wise. It is not a case of mutual influence – both Nancy and I entertain the same general thoughts about photography – although she is more catholic than I am…

What bothers me is a deep-seated resentment over the one-sided direction of most documentary work. As I said, I get no human emotion from pictures of this type; I get only a sense of group, mass, class condition. As it is only a small part of the whole framework of humanity – and a damned negative one at that – I find myself entertaining an increasing tension about it.

I must say that I think I have had more experience with the seamy side than you imagine. I do not come from “wealth”; I have friends and enemies in all classes! I simply prefer the clean sidewalk to the gutter. I have sympathy for the “underprivileged,” but I am not so sure that all of the “class” are of the proletariat. What I really resent is the limitation of experience evidenced by “line” emphasis. The spirit of the 30’s was one of despair – the “line” psychology – often not recognized as such by the photographer himself – dominated the human scene. The camera lied and lied again – it also told some profound truths. But “revelation” finally exhausted itself; there was a crying need for a constructive approach in all art. It is childish to continue to dwell on the negative aspects of society at least to concentrate on them.

What about the positive potentials of America? Where are the ministers, doctors, lawyers, artists, businessmen, family people, artisans – the people with homes, professions, jobs, avocations? Where are the people that compose a large part of the nation – the ordinary, healthy, reasonably smart, reasonably aware, reasonably successful people? … What we really need is a revival of the Walt Whitman spirit – the acceptance of the WHOLE of humanity. Photography, when it tells the truth, is magnificent, but it can be twisted, deformed, restricted, and compromised more than any other art. Because, what is before the lens always has the illusion of reality; but what is selected and put before the lens can be as false as any totalitarian lie. While it is true that we get from pictures pretty much what we bring to them in our minds and hearts, we are still restricted by the content and the connotations of the image before us. If the picture is of a clam I don’t think about flamingos! The connotations of much of documentary photography are – to me – quite rigid; proletarianism, low-level urbanism, protest, patronizing of a “class,” and an ever-present aura of the “line” of psychology. On top of that is an esoteric symbolism which, too, has a questionable importance.

I resent being told that certain things have “significance”; that is for me, as spectator, to discover. I resent being manipulated into a politico-social function if it is not of value to people at large. I resent the very obvious dislike of elements of beauty; our friend Steichen has shocked me time and again by a self-conscious fear of the beautiful. Does he feel that way about a painting, about sculpture, architecture, literature, and just plain nature? He does not. I am not afraid of beauty, of poetry, of sentiment. I think it is just as important to bring to people the evidence of the beauty of the world of nature and of man as it is to give them a “document” of ugliness, squalor, and despair.

I DO think that the whole pattern of life should be subject to the photographer’s interpretation – with honesty and clarity and tolerance. For every grim image of [an impoverished location] there should be some buoyant truthful image of a hopeful society and some image of the natural scene…

Is there no way photography can be used to suggest a better life – not just to stress the unfortunate aspects of existence or the tragic satirical viewpoint of the photographer? There must be. There is a great opportunity ahead and I think we are all muffing it.

You happen to be one of the few who has brought enough deeply human emotion into your work to make it bearable for me. I wish you would try and think of yourself as a fine artist – which you are; that is a damn sight more important to the world than being merely an extension of a sociological movement.

Love,
Ansel

I imagine Degas may have been anticipating this sentiment when he remarked “the fine arts must be discouraged”. Elsewhere in Adams’ writings, in a letter to Edward Weston, he places Lange on a spectrum between fine arts Weston and realist Walker Evans and tells Weston “Your shells will be remembered long after Evans’ pictures of two destitutes in a doorway.” I think it’s ultimately a wanting dichotomy (though perhaps it’s a reminder, as the saying goes, the rich have their own photographers).

Fiction is a certain packaging of the truth, or higher truths. Indeed I find that there is more truth in Proust, albeit it is officially fictional, than in the babbling analyses of the New York Times that give us the illusions of understanding what’s going on. Newspapers have officially the right facts, but their interpretations are imaginary – and their choice of facts are arbitrary. They lie with right facts; a novelist says the truth with wrong facts.

—N. N. Taleb, Conversation with Rolf Dobelli, 2007

I’ve traveled for extended periods over the past few years with my cousin and my uncle as traveling companions. I’ve loved seeing how others live and recognizing the commonalities that are unchanged wherever one goes. But with regards to the speed of things, my cousin is happy to be in a town for a single day and to move to the next town the very next day. My preference is to stick around in a place for some time, attempting to get a feel of what it might be like to live there. Long enough to develop routines. I think often about this quote from Life photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson, the second half especially is my style as well:

I have traveled a good deal… I like to take my time about it, leaving between one country and the next an interval in which to digest what I’ve seen. Once I had arrived in a new country, I almost feel like settling down there, so as to live on proper terms with the country. I could never be a globetrotter.

—HCB