Well, cows, of course.  And cats and puppy dogs and little kids with ice cream cones.  And did I mention cows?

These beauties are crowding up to get a taste of that sweet, green grass, which smells soooo good.  OK, the photo probably was posed; that grass may have just been there, but I wouldn’t bet on it.  And is Cute really photography’s subject?  The short answer is no, despite the millions of cutesie images in family albums, on company bulletin boards, on Facebook pages, and elsewhere around the home, office, and Web.

And this blog stays away from Cute (OK, not entirely, there are exceptions, they can be explained. . . . ), so what’s with posting up these cows from a farm near Kirkjubæjarklaustur in south Iceland?   The not so short answer is that the image was selected because it’s a stretch from what I want to say about photography; if the argument can stick here, it will apply many other places as well.

So what’s the argument?  First, some context.  From its inception photography has been understood to be characteristically modern.  The photograph was a technological innovation, unknown to all prior civilizations, and it was experienced initially amidst “vast changes in society and in culture” created by startling advances in science, technology, industrialization, and urbanization (Alan Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography, ix).  Nor has this representative aura diminished as modern life became saturated with images: successive developments from the hand-held camera to color photography to digitization have been symbols of progress and lightening rods for anxiety about change.  Where early commentators lauded its likely value to the sciences while debating whether it would help or harm the arts, today the scope of its influence is summed up in the claim that Photography Changes Everything.  In the supposedly innocent act of objectively recording the world, photography has changed the way people in modern societies see everything, and with that, it has changed how they think, feel, relate to one another, and otherwise share a common world, that is, a culture.

Such comprehensive change is what it means to become modern: the common world of photography is the world as it is observed and imagined within a modern society.  That culture is, by definition, ambivalent in respect to questions of value, for modernization has always been experienced as both creative and destructive, marked by both gain and loss, producing winners and losers, as these are inevitable outcomes of continuous and often radical change.  Famine disappears, but so does tradition.  Prosperity increases, but so does loneliness.  One can “see the world,” and watch jobs migrate to other countries.  So it is that photography bears responsibility for another burden, the weight of modernity itself as it presses down on society.  Both effect and cause of modernization, agency of both enlightenment and alienation, instrument of both civilizational progress and the deadening uniformity of a machine age, photography is in the curious position of being an inexpensive medium having very high stakes.

The quality of the discourse on photography probably turns on how it handles the medium’s relationship to modernity.  One reason the critical discourse authored by Susan Sontag, Alan Sekula, John Berger, and others has become so important is that it took photography’s relationship with modernity very seriously. What was equally important, however, was that the emphasis was on the negative consequences.  Whatever positive benefits had accrued were taken for granted, while the task of critique logically focused attention of what had gone wrong.  And apparently a lot had gone wrong:  As Sontag announced: “Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.  Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution” (On Photography, p. 24.)

If that sounds a tad harsh, well, it is a tad harsh.  The authors of this blog believe the time has come for a paradigm shift, that is, for a more sophisticated discourse on photography that can better account for the full range of photographic experiences and effects, as well as the complexity of the relationship between photography and modernity.  It would take too long to do that in small steps, so let me set out a different proposition, one that doesn’t refute Sontag directly, but instead offers a different point of departure, different questions, and a different approach toward how those questions might be answered.  (Needless to say, that’s what this blog has been trying to do for several years, but perhaps success is just around the corner.)

And so we get to the argument: What is most important about photography is not that it requires machine age and now computer age technologies, or that its products can be reproduced cheaply (and now ever more cheaply) and widely (and now ever more widely).  Though shaped by these attributes, the single most important characteristic of photography is that its distinctive content is modernity itself.

Literature, painting, film and any other art are not locked in to the depiction of the present, and they are free to take up any topic or theme one might wish.  They are produced in the present and will inevitably reflect the conditions of their time, but they have the freedom to go where they will.  Their significance comes from being works of art, and only then from concerns about relevance.  Photography, however, is nothing if it is not about something, and about something that is happening now or that influenced the present or should be faced in the present.  Likewise, a literary or plastic art is defined primarily by its relationship to the history of that art.  Photography’s history, by contrast, is a very weak force.  Because the reality principle is primary, the aesthetic form has to cohere with that principle rather than bend the image too much along the lines of an artistic tradition.  More conventionally, most arts are valued as their work can become “timeless,” a transcendent status reflecting their mastery of artistic technique to fully realize a mode of perception or express an essential truth about human nature.  Photography is never timeless.  Instead, it is defined by its relation to the conditions of its making and always caught in the dilemma of recording a continually disappearing present.

These formal considerations are the least of it, however.  The relationship to modernity may be contingent, an accident of birth or development that bonded the medium to the self-awareness of its historical epoch.  It now is set, however: photography is the archive of vernacular life, displayed to allow reflection on how everyone is being affected by the ongoing changes that define modern societies.

Photography thus is a representative practice of modern life to a greater extent than Sontag and other critics imagined.  It not only carries all the defining features and troubling effects of modernization and democratization, but also casts all of modern life into a reflective space.  Photography doesn’t merely record modern society, it provides a performative re-enactment of how that society gets through the day, how it is made up of multiple ways of seeing from a stolen glance to satellite images of cities aglow at night, and whether it is moving into a future of continued progress or impending catastrophe.

Thus, photography puts the world on parade, and let’s hear it for parades, but its most important function is to mirror modern society.  Its subject matter is whatever is of enough interest to become framed by a viewfinder, but its content is the continuing and somewhat indirect discovery and questioning of what it means to be modern.

Which is why I decided to go with the cows. The photography may be Cute, or a sympathetic glimpse into a culture of animal husbandry, or an uncanny encounter with the idea that cows can be closer to pets than many people realize, or a direct contrast with the brutal feedlots of modern agribusiness, but it is something else as well.  It is another small part of the ongoing chronicle of modernity.  Of how modern civilization still includes living near large animals, and still has some space (albeit in Iceland) for them to be raised humanely, and yet clearly sees them as apart, more a part of nature to be managed for human use rather than participants within our social world, and (as alluded above) of how we know–but prefer not to think about–that most of them are used much more callously–and so forth and so on.  One could say it’s not really about cows at all, but about how modern society is disposed to think about and treat cows, right down to using the Cute Pet hook to get an audience in the first place.

In addition, the photo could be another, very small example of how photography changes everything, that is, how it is part of modern technological, economic, and cultural processes that continually destroy or transform the traditional world and then do the same to modern societies as well.  And an example of how those changes need not all be negative.  For example, we might consider how by becoming photographed the cows acquire a provisional equality of some sort with the species taking the photograph.  If so, perhaps a more advanced version of modernity, one of greater dignity for more species, is also suggested here, albeit as the exception during one of the great die-offs in natural history, a cataclysm caused by the unfettered expansion of modern civilization.

Like I said, the argument may come down to the cows after all.

Photograph by Erlendur Gudmundsson from the National Geographic Daily Dozen, March 11, 2014.

 

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We’re traveling this week and may even get some down time, so the next new post will be on March 24.  See you then.

Photograph by Daniel Karmann/AFP-Getty Images.

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You can see why I asked the question.  Like the caption itself (“Still Life”), every detail of the composition connects directly to the art of painting, and to its history and within that to a specific genre, and within that to a particular style.  And “composition” refers to both the technical values of the image and the careful arrangement of the objects that were photographed.  There is nothing accidental here, and so the intention seems clear: to create an image, and response, that would as closely as possible approximate the experience of viewing a work of fine art.

Which would be enough to make some critics go ballistic.  From Baudelaire to Sontag and beyond, the censors’ reactions have been clear.  It is only an approximation, and a cheap one at that, they say.  The skill that is supposedly on display–and that was reason for the existence and value of the genre in the first place–is in fact being supplied by the camera.  Oh, sure, some technical craft is involved, just as is the case with arranging the table, or for that matter a department store window, but it can be learned in hours, not the years that would be required to paint such an image.  Worse, that de-skilling is matched by a loss of value in the work and in the audience.  Finely wrought images become cheap things to be admired and as quickly forgotten.  Because of the easy reproduction of the image, the artwork loses the aura that comes from being experienced within a tradition, and with that loss we become less capable of being open to or improved by the art itself.  Instead, modern society becomes susceptible to kitsch and related habits of excessive consumption.  A still life on your desk top, or those cheap reproductions of Modern Art  in every hotel room, or it doesn’t matter: whatever they are, they are not really art.

I’ve argued against this attitude, and usually I take the angle of saying that photography is not a fine art and all the more important for that; instead it is a public art, among other things, all of which have considerable value for modern society and politics.  (By the way, you don’t win an argument with an attitude in a day.)  Today, however, I want to take a different tack.

My argument can be stated very simply: It’s beautiful.  You can tell me that it’s derivative or that it’s not authentic or that it’s more contrived that photography should be, but you can’t tell me it’s not beautiful.  (And I’m speaking for me, by the way, not you.  If I’m a sucker for elegance or any other social value evident in the image, that’s my problem, though certainly not one foreign to painting.)  My idle scanning through a slide show stopped the moment I say it, and my day is richer for having seen it.  Nor is it idiosyncratically or oddly beautiful; instead, its beauty comes in part from how well it has reproduced the conventions of the painterly genre.  Trust me, I’ve seen a lot of still lifes, and I’ve walked by a good number that did not catch me as this one did.  (Yes, this had the advantage of not being in a museum context, but frankly I think photography always is orienting us, to greater or lesser degree, to see as if we were in a large, open air museum.  Furthermore, it stood out at National Geographic, which is saying something as far as photography goes.)  Long story short, although I never would have set out today to look at still life paintings, this photograph provided one nonetheless, and it’s beautiful, and I’m grateful for that.

There also is a more complicated argument to be developed along the same path, but I’m running out of time.  One thing to consider is how the photographer has labored to put photography back into the tradition of painting, and how something like an aura may be one result.  At the same time, there is little likelihood that anyone would mistake this image at a photography website for a painting, so perhaps the art of approximation also is being featured, and with that the conventions and history of the artistic genre.  This image may be an imitation of a painting, but also an imitation of a photograph; and it may be about photography more than painting, which would move it closer to the work of art in any medium.  (Admittedly, this still life doesn’t stun me, enthrall me, and challenge me as the best art does, but in my experience that’s a problem of the genre.)  And if it is about photography, then it is about modernity.  If tired of defending the arts, you might to think about that.

It might also be a statement that simple elegance is more available than we might think–much like a photograph is less expensive and more accessible than a painting.  It could be a demonstration of how beauty can be shared easily via photography, indeed, how photography is pitched toward sharing while painting continues to be defined largely by hoarding in mansions and corporate hallways.  When a photograph imitates an older art form, such questions are brought to mind.  Surely that can’t be all bad.

Photograph: “Still Life” by Rucsandra Calin, Craiova, Dolj, Romania, from National Geographic’s Daily Dozen, March 11, 2014.

 

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Winter still hangs on in the Northern Hemisphere, with the occasional thaw only enough to bring up the accumulated dirt and trash.  In the Crimea, another democratic spring has been flipped within days into another authoritarian consolidation of power; the pattern is now all too clear, while the rapidity of the military response is becoming truly impressive.  In Malaysia, a 777 has disappeared into thin air; at least the UFO hunters will be thrilled, but everyone else who flies now lives in a slightly more uncomfortable world.  And if that weren’t enough disquiet, for some us the calendar has moved into Lent, a time for reflection on our many personal failings.  So perhaps you can appreciate why I am grateful for this photograph.

The caption at The Big Picture said: “Reflected in a puddle of melted snow, people and dogs walk past umbrellas suspended from trees at Spanish Banks Beach in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Feb. 25.  The art installation, called the ‘Rainblossom Project’, was put up by an anonymous group to be a celebration of the rain the city receives.”

My favorite part of that caption is the word “anonymous.”  Whatever else happened on February 25th, there was someone in Vancouver who wasn’t working on branding, who wasn’t worried about others free-riding, who was willing to spend time and money and effort to improve the commons, and do it without any reward, much less making a profit.  Maybe it was a hedge fund manager on his day off, but I doubt it.  This was done by someone who cares about art and the general welfare in equal measure, and who is able to express those commitments generously.  We can call it a random act of public art.

The same can be said of the photograph.  “Random” may seem incorrect, for surely the photographer was acting on an intention, but the same is true of the red umbrella hangers and the other strangers signified by the allusion to “random acts of kindness.”  The act is, by definition, intentional, but “random” because not directed by the usual logics of economic exchange, competitive marketing, political persuasion, or even direct social reciprocity.  Yes, the photographer will have been paid for the image, but there was no guarantee of that happening, not least because there was little chance of finding hard news, or even soft news, on a beach in Vancouver in February.  This image barely qualifies as news at all, although it does inform us about the public artwork on the beach.  It’s something else: another work of public art, and one just about as incidental, unexpected, ephemeral, and generous as the other.

And what a fine work it is.  The photo is true to the work it depicts, while enhancing and extending it as well.  The red umbrellas hang improbably in the sky, and the trees, mountain, clouds, sky, and lake seem equally improbable and beautiful as well.  That lake, itself perhaps newly freed from the ice, reflects the figures above it, just as the photograph reflects the entire tableau.  Likewise, the deep blues balance the blossoms of bright red, as if they were low and high notes harmonizing.  These symmetrical optics evoke a sense of serenity, but not by pretending that the scene is any more solid than it is.  The reflection on the water can be broken by a single ripple, just as the scene can disappear the moment you turn away.

And we all will turn away.  Even those in the scene, who rightly seem to be enjoying it immensely, will walk on.  The clouds will thicken, and the rain will come–remember, the umbrellas are an offering of gratitude for the rain–and the umbrellas will deteriorate or be taken down.  Like the rain, this scene is not something that you can hold on to.  Only the photograph will remain, albeit probably forgotten.  But that’s OK, if we understand what it is teaching us today.

The world is more abundant that we know.  Not always, but too often the suffering that occurs is due to artificial scarcities: due to greed, hoarding, and the withholding of kindness.  Any decent society ultimately depends on more than natural abundance: on commitments to the common good, the general welfare, and sharing in both hard times and good times.  So it is that we ought to feel thankful for those artists and arts that are themselves acts of generosity for a public world.

Photograph by Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via Associated Press

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