Cameraless Photography

9/13/2014

Your eyes always take the best pictures. A snapshot can get close to what is seen with the eyes, but a more intense photographic image takes a long time to create, or become more relevant over time, as in documentary photography.

[9/13/2024: Once you begin taking photographs with your first camera, you start seeing the world in a different way–even if your camera wasn’t armed to take a snapshot. Technology is a “lens” in the same way that the invention of eyeglasses in the 13th century changed our experience of the world. In the 21st century it was the invention of the smartphone that we used to document the world. I’m sometimes reminded of a photo exhibition of Polaroids that were exhibited showing only the reverse sides with handwritten notes on them. Lots of images are now generated by text prompts, which are a kind of “caption” that creates the image, and is cameraless. The captions on the backs of the Polaroids projected the photograph in your mind. Now the projector is AI].

Everyone now has a camera with them. But should we always take a snapshot of something we think is interesting? Perhaps. Images sometimes take a while to attract relevance.

Sometimes if you take a picture of something uninteresting or boring, the viewer may question why it has any pictorial value. The photographer usually asks the same question and the answer is probably the same in both cases: there's something happening outside the frame--meaning an observation has been made without seeing with the eyes.

Making Photographs

Cameras are not always necessary to make photographs. They are necessary to take photographs; making them is a more rigorous process.

Photography in some respects is about memory and storytelling, and is very much like painting (even though photography was supposed to supplant it.)

Jeff Wall ‘The Destroyed Room’ 1978

Death-of-Sardanapalus, Eugène Delacroix

Cinematography can inspire the staging of still images, as in the work of Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson, that is more like a film production than ordinary photography. Since this is much more methodical, it sets itself apart from snapshot or street photography.

Snapshot photography can sometimes incorporate elements of cinema in terms of mood and narrative:

"Often in a scene, the room and the light together signify a mood. So even if the room isn't perfect, you can work with the light and get it to feel correct, so that it has the mood that came with the original idea...." David Lynch, Catch the Big Fish

William Eggleston was a master of photographic moods captured in images that seem like scouted photos for a possible film location, or a frame capture from a longer scene.

In this photograph, one can imagine cars passing by, a pedestrian walking around the corner into the glow of the street light, the headlights and taillights of the parked car coming on and driving away--or any number of possible situations taking place in real time, passing through the edges of the frame.

The snapshot seldom has a narrative, but the staged photo (since it takes a much longer time to create) can attract or suggest artificial narratives over time. Snapshots are not necessarily about something.

If this was not a snapshot, but rather a staged photograph, this may have been what the photographer originally saw at the original location, then recreated that moment, just as the sun was setting, replete with a rented white 1959 Ford Galaxie.

The Camera As Memory Theater

Memory is less like a movie than it is like a slideshow of images, or even one representational frame. If perception could be measured in frames-per-second, the number would not be infinite. In many ways cameras see better than the eye, and a still image extracted from film footage could be one that the eye never notices. Even if perception could be established as 60,000 frames-per-second, the brain is only perceiving a infinitesimally small number of them. The brain naturally discards superfluous information, sometimes referred to as exformation --distillations from the flood of information from the optical nerve.

Memories themselves are a type of "room" that we go into to see what happened there or what is stored there. The Memory Theater is a mnemonic system whereby objects placed in certain imagined locations in the mind are associated with remembering something. The photo scouting that photographers sometimes do is somewhat like a mnemonic device.

A photographic image leave traces about what optics and light do when captured temporally and spatially and displayed on a surface. The brain is doing the same thing, and is in essence a camera obscura, or room for storing memories.

Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson both have confessed that they don't always carry cameras with them, but rather observe and mentally encode places, and later go back to the studio to recreate the memory in a photograph. In certain ways this is more interesting than a snapshot, as it allows the artist to carefully fill the frame with narratives or other points on interest.

Given that photos now can be endlessly manipulated digitally, the veracity of a snapshot always has a shadow of doubt cast upon it.

Then there is the memory of the actual photograph of the event, not the event itself which will have one generation of transmission loss, with further deterioration in later generations. If there are no descriptions or captions identifying people and places, a photo collection is just like any other: strangers that look like other people in other photo collections. After all it's just lots of people taking pictures of the same time period.

Sometimes they can be juxtaposed across time periods, but the effect is the same: It is another city street in our collection of fungible street memories. Without having been there, there is nothing to add to the viewing experience. The interest lies mainly in the temporal juxtaposition.

Toronto: http://www.new-media.ca/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/toronto.jpg

It could be an elegant assumption that photography is essentially all about memory, or about connecting with or activating dormant memories. Jeff Wall asserts that he initially wanted to be a painter, and recreates tableaux via staged photographs from memories of places. The snapshot preserves a memory, and a staged photo is assembled from that memory. The eyes can serve as a camera if time is taken to actually see and encode the world.

When everyone is a photographer by virtue of having a camera at hand, where is the unique vision of a photographer beyond the snapshot? Artistic (photographic) vision doesn't require a camera necessarily.