This morning I hooked up Photodocs to my Flickr account. I’ll be looking for whatever synergies there might be between the two environments. Suggestions?

But at the end of the day, it’s words about pictures. I’ll soon post some info about the research/reading and thinking I’ve been doing over the past number of months. So please stay tuned.

Since Photodocs contains words about pictures, I thought it might be appropriate to republish the Pavemental Intro as an example; I leave it to you to decide whether it’s a good example, bad or indifferent. Here it is.

500 Years of Women in Western Art

Most websites have a FAQ containing answers to questions frequently asked. This website has a TUQs containing questions not yet answered. It is the Photodocs agenda, the outline of the site.

TUQs is a list of questions about photography, each with a short bit attached to suggest why it may be worth considering. Over time, if and when I can create a longer piece that tries for an answer, I’ll update this page with a link to the new material. I’ll also update this page when new questions occur to me. Please use the comments form to send your own questions; I’ll add the best, most provocative and, if possible, try to find an answer. Please feel free to contribute your answers via the comments to posts as they appear.

What is a photograph?

This is the question that underlies all the rest. These days, virtually everyone has a camera of some sort. We are all photographers. We all make images. But what are we doing? Really? What do we make when we push that button? Is there an answer? Is there an answer based on, for example: the way photographs are made, the purposes to which they are put, the values or meanings we attach to them—as photographers, viewers, decision-makers, investors, thinkers or fun seekers?

Can a photograph be good?

During his life time, Vincent Van Gogh sold one painting. Later, after two generations of his family had preserved and promoted his work, he began to grow into the iconic figure he is today. The founder of Expressionism. On the other hand, during his life time, Pablo Picasso (a founder of Cubism) became a wealthy man from his art many times over. Were Van Gogh’s paintings not good and then gradually, increasingly good? Were Picasso’s paintings good and then even better after his death? In general, what does good have to do with sales or the price garnered at auction? Once good, always good?

Is every photograph art?

On the front page of this website I quote Ernst Gombrich as saying, in effect, there is no such thing as Art, there are only artists. While Gombrich said it and I quoted it, I didn’t mean for the statement to go unquestioned. Questions and answers about the existence or nonexistence of art are most important; they fascinate me; they are the reason this site exists.

For example, as I write these words (26 June 2007) there is news on the Internet of the recent death of Bernd Becher. In his remembrance, Mike Johnson said, “The formal beauty of their investigations has long been appreciated, and has earned for Bernd and Hilla Becher widespread acclaim as art photographers.” Look at a small collection of images he and his wife created. Are the artistic merits of the work immediately obvious?

Can there be something artistically or aesthetically unique about a photograph? Something that is not an artistic quality of, say, a painting or an etching? If so, what is it?

Does digital make a difference?

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find supplies for doing traditional, chemistry-based photography—film, developer, paper for printing. Certainly for 35 mm format. Not too long ago, many mom-and-pop video rental stores and drug stores had a film processing machine for producing 4 by 6 or 5 by 7 inch prints from colour negative film. No longer.

Now, cameras seem to be built into everything—cell phones and laptop computers in particular. Digital imaging is becoming more ubiquitous than film ever was. Aside from ubiquity, has the transition to digital changed anything about photography? In fact, should we still be using the word photography? What qualitative or aesthetic changes are taking place that differentiate digital imaging from the old silver-based photography? Will silver-based photography survive? Revive? In what forms? What are the new features inherent in the digi part of imaging? Where will they take us as photographers and viewers?

I think my first encounter with Picasso came in a round-about way: as a musician in the 1970s, I was a great fan of the series of books written by Robert Craft and generically titled, “Conversations with Stravinsky.” It was in one of those Penguin paperbacks that I learned of the incredible era of collaborative creativity that transpired in Paris during the first quarter of the 1900s. It was then that Picasso, Stravinsky, Diaghilev (and his Ballets Russes) and other luminaries of modernism worked and played together. Diaghilev and Stravinsky created three 20th century masterpieces during these years: L’Oiseau de feu (“The Firebird”) (1910), Petrushka (1911), and Le sacre du printemps (“The Rite of Spring”) (1913).

Later, in 1920, Diaghilev commissioned Stravinsky to score Pulcinella. Picasso designed the costumes and sets while Léonide Massine created both libretto and choreography. Stravinsky’s response on being introduced to the little known, original music of Pergolesi is reported to have been: “A colour only has value in relation to the other colours which are placed next to it. Red has no value in itself. It only acquires it through its proximity to another red or a green, for example. And that is what I have wanted to do in music and what I look for first of all is quality of sound.” I don’t know if this is good science, but it certainly is provocative, almost as provocative as the other, more famous Stravinsky-ana: “music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all.” Perhaps this is what Gombrich meant when he said there is no such thing as art, only artists!?

There have been many photographs made of both Stravinsky and Picasso. And there are a number of portraits of Stravinsky done by Picasso; you can see a pencil piece here, in this excellent Wikipedia survey of Stravinsky’s life and work. One of my favorite photo portraits of Stravinsky is that done my Arnold Newman.

Pulitzer Prize winner, Claude Cookman has posted some class notes called Compare and Contrast to accompany a 20th century history of photography course he taught at Indiana University; he uses words wonderfully well to compare and contrast two photo portraits of Stravinsky—Newman’s and one of the two I’m aware of done by Henri Cartier-Bresson.

I think it’s important to always remember that the work artists do never exists in a vacuum, no matter how independent or revolutionary the impetus. Sometimes, as in the case of Stravinsky, Picasso and the other artist denizens of Paris of the teens and 20s of the last century, you luck out and inhabit an environment almost jungle-like in its primitive and rich fertility. Hopefully, one is young at the same time. And survives. One of my favourite books about that period is by Modris Eksteins. It’s called “Rites of Spring: The Great War And The Birth Of The Modern Age.”

A photographer colleague who has given up making “art” urged me to burn my Gombrich. Reading it will undermine my photography. I’m not going to burn my Gombrich because I know reading it has nothing to do with what happens when I have a camera in my hand. Making photographs is “much ado about nothing.” When they ask, “What was going through your head when you made that picture?” I want to say, “Nothing.” I’ve been back and forth between the two sides of my brain enough to know when I’m in the moment. When I’m making my best pictures, the chatter of words stops; I work in a silent, almost purely attavistic, visual mode. It’s almost the same when looking at photographs.

But sometimes we can’t seem to have any kind of relationship with photographs. We can’t explain what we think about them — other than in half-remembered generalizations. I know many can’t seem to “see” my pictures — good, bad or indifferent — or those of others whose work I admire. The only contact points I’ve discovered arise from words, ideas.

I think it’s possible to turn on and enhance visual experience. It’s possible to step out of the visual box that we all live in, inundated as we are with media chatter. Yes, great photographs stand on their own, but I think we can always learn to see them better. Or develop the confidence to articulate an informed opinion. Or create the vocabulary with which to do so. When we confidently confront an image and talk about it, it’s good for everybody. Somehow, the world becomes a more civilized place in which to live. We are more in control of our lives. This I believe.

So this website is a forum of words and ideas driven by images. In addition to showing work, I’ll be looking for verbal pieces to the visual puzzle. When you visit, you’ll see interesting, perhaps challenging things, you’ll find new ideas about photography. You’ll have encounters that I hope will help your photo experience grow richer.