F***KR! (amended ruminations on excessivity) (7/29/08)

“Gazing on other people’s reality with curiosity, with detachment, with professionalism, the ubiquitous photographer operates as if that activity transcends class interests, as if its perspective is universal. ”

* Susan Sontag, On Photography

 

99% of you have never heard the Devo song “Swelling Itching Brain.” You are undoubtedly the lucky ones . . . This once obscure medical condition threatens to become an epidemic, in light of the mind-numbing amount of photography (re: digital imaging) available to view online.

There is now a virtual global community of street photographers. As of today, there are 6,505 groups dedicated to street photography on the Internet photography collective Flickr (up from a mere 6,300 two weeks ago). The most popular of these groups contains more than 180,000 images. There are groups that pay homage to Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, William Klein and Walker Evans, and at least one that accepts only images made in what its administrators imagine to be the style and spirit of Robert Frank. One can only wonder how this sits with the now octogenarian artist, who in 1958 wrote of his “genuine distrust” toward group activities. “Mass production of uninspired photojournalism and photography without thought becomes anonymous merchandise. The air becomes infected with the ‘smell’ of photography,” he prophesized. (The smell could also be kitty litter: there are almost 3,000 groups dedicated to kittens).

Today, the stylistic innovations employed by  Frank and Winogrand in the 1950’s and 1960s are so commonplace they have become not only a cliché, but institutionalized. A group calling themselves “The World At Street Level,” advertises a course in street photography based on an adherence to the working philosophy of Winogrand, featuring lessons in “anti-composition,” where students “unlearn the classical rules of composition in order to discover a uniquely photographic visual language.” Participants in the workshop are also instructed how to “walk up to total strangers and take their pictures while looking through the viewfinder,” in a “non-threatening” manner. (I couldn’t make this up if I tried).

Street photography incorporates environmental portraiture, done in a "non-threatening" manner. You might need lessons for this.

 

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Today everything exists to be photographed.” 

* Susan Sontag

 

 

Garry Winogrand had a similar quote: “I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.”  Upon his death in 1984, the prolific Winogrand left more than 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film. This, added to the 7,000 rolls he had developed but not proofed, amounts to well over a quarter million frames, exposed but never fully realized. In retrospect, it could be argued that while Winogrand approached his work with a critical intelligence bordering on the obsessive, and created some of the most memorable, iconic images in street photography history, he also foreshadowed the era of disposable imagery we now find ourselves in. The requisite Google search of “street photography” uncovers a staggering 14 million results, a bottomless pit of individual and group sites, blogs and workshops. The sheer magnitude, and the kaleidoscopic, mind-numbing sameness of the photographs found on sites such as Flickr also lends new credence to John Berger’s axiom, “If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.”   In today’s lexicon, the word random has come to represent the mainstreaming of postmodern leveling. Fittingly, photographers of every stripe meet on Flickr: amateurs and professionals, the unpretentious and the naïve, the earnest and the glib, anarchists and the avant-garde, all share their images of street life the world over.   (Oddly, there are a lot of photographs of beaches posted in some of these street photography groups).

Like Winogrand’s excess, most of these images never make it to a paper-based print form, heralding in a sea change for photography as a vernacular art form. On the positive side, this explosion of street photography provides us with glimpses of life in cities as diverse as Tehran, Amsterdam, Chicago, Beijing and Reykjavík. Universality and Brotherhood are (very) loosely aligned. Yet the sheer ubiquity brings on a sort of vertigo of perception (the swelling itching brain!).  I’m still not sure if the surprise is pleasant or disturbing when I can’t tell which city or even country I’m looking at.

Flickr, while essentially benign and oblivious to its own redundancy, is far more useful as a center for virtual support groups than serious critical examination of photography in general, or street photography in particular. I too use Flickr, mainly for the storage, organization and viewing of the Broadway project. I have found some constructive criticisms, and even the friendship of like-minded individuals, but have also gotten into pseudo-arguments with people who seemed to consider any form of self-examination or critical thinking to be anathema to the making of interesting photographs (and this in a group facetiously calling itself “Hardcore Street Photography”). Ultimately, most of the inter-group communication is platitudinal in nature.  The lingo is telling: a common generic phrase used to show appreciation for an image is “nice capture!”  It’s as though we are all participating in one immense, virtual scavenger hunt.