Philosophy

http://leicaphilia.com/ is a fascinating blog that I look at every now and then. In this age of internet gear geeks, this fellow, who among other things has a philosophy background, tends to focus much more on the act of creating images, and things which facilitate doing so. Also unlike many of the photography blogs I've seen recently, there's some quality work posted. It's refreshing to see black & white images that have a full tonal range, it's all too rare.

He doesn't post that often. In what is, at this writing, the most recent post (August 2021), he says:

"...a creator should never explain his work. Much better to just put it out there and let people explain it for themselves. There’s nothing worse, in my mind, then pretentious artist’s statements. Good art comes from somewhere other than the logical mind and can only be diminished by intellectualizing it."

I partially agree. Or maybe I agree part of the time. Certainly I'm guilty of sometimes wanting to explain at least my overall concept, although they tend to be short explanations and I hope they're not pretentious. As both a writer and photographer, it helps me to write about my thought process, it helps the concept to more fully come together more quickly. Perhaps the decision then is if, or when, to share those writings and when to keep them personal. Recently I've done it both ways. Going forward, probably it will depend on the concept and on the setting and on my mood at the time.

We're in complete agreement that it helps a great deal to have a theme or a concept to tie the work together. I'm not going to go look for the exact quotes, but it's there in more than one place, all the more reason for you to go take a look of your own. For me, the realization that the concept is really important was a paradigm shift, a night and day difference in how I photographed. The day I figured it out was the day I was offered my first serious gallery exhibit and that was not a coincidence, and that curator gets a lot of credit for gently nudging me to the realization. Ralph Gibson talks about something similar in his book "Duex ex Machina" where (on page 9, in the introduction) he quotes Dorothea Lange calling it a "point of departure." That story, about a conversation that happened in San Francisco in the early 1960s, was printed in a book structured as multiple themed chapters, that was published in 1999; not long after I consciously figured out something that I'd already done accidentally and subconsciously during my post-punk photojournalist years and then forgotten for a while. For both of us, and probably for many others, it took a while to understand.

Us art photography types often tend to overthink the concept. At least that's the realization I came to after one of several conversations with fashion photographer Sam Hessamian https://www.thecoolist.com/sam-hessamian-fashion-photography/  Sam was one of the f-eleven collective photographers, one of the about 40% of the group that I never met in person, but we did talk during the time the books were being put together. That was about 12 years ago so I can only roughly paraphrase now. Roughly, what Sam told me was that as a working fashion photographer he had to sometimes have a theme... what he called "a story" several times in a week, which didn't leave time to overthink it. And that a story didn't need to be complicated, that it could be as simple as "red." I'm pretty sure that was the example he used. All that mattered was that something tied the images together into a semi-coherent whole.

Almost everything I've done since that conversation with a gallery curator in... 1998? has had a theme or concept. Before that, back in the beginning, my mainstream 1970s photojournalism work had default themes because I was usually working specific assignments given by my editor. Then my post-punk work was conceptual because of a cultural accident, the subculture itself tied everything together, made the images about something. It wasn't til later that I had to figure it out for myself, and that required first an understanding. Sometimes a concept lasts a week, sometimes it lasts a decade. Sometimes they're simple, sometimes they're complex. Whatever the circumstance of the moment, that's made all the difference.