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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Saturday, December 15, 2007
An admittedly rather nondescript article on American photography struck my attention just now for this set of opening paragraphs:"Cities and the people who live in them are the classic subjects of photography. One of Daguerre's earliest photographs is a view of a busy Paris street in 1838, but the people and the vehicles streaming by are moving too quickly to leave an impression on his very slow emulsion: only the unmoving lower leg of a man having his shoe shined remains to be seen in an apparently empty street. As materials and equipment were refined in the following decades, the images of passersby began to register more and more frequently in photographs, and by the middle of the twentieth century, modern photography had become steeped in the instantaneous. City streets even at night were viable settings for encounters between passersby and the camera, and in the work of Brassai and Cartier-Bresson (who conceived of the "decisive moment") in Paris and Lisette Model on the Riviera, an urban photography emerged that consisted largely of encounters and confrontation between photographers and an anonymous citizenry. An exception was Eugene Atget, who prowled the streets of old Paris for decades with an antique field camera, intent on his mission of recording (on slow emulsion) a city and a way of living that was disappearing rather than passing by. Atget’s enormous body of work, which includes no image of the Eiffel Tower, the most prominent landmark in Paris, was "discovered" in 1925 by Berenice Abbott (herself an inventor of an urban photography of New York City that might be compared to jazz), who wrote of the "shock of realism unadorned" that she experienced upon first seeing Atget’s work."
The comment about the people emerging in Daguerre's work as liminal wraiths in an otherwise realistic setting rather reminds me of Godfrey Reggio's cinematography in the Qatsi Trilogy, where pullulating swarms of people pass through places like train stations which remain fixed and constant as all around them is flux and disorder. In my own photographs, I tend to go to great lengths to avoid having any people present in my images of the city. The City of London is eerie outside of the working week, with markets like Leadenhall silent and empty in the heart of one of the world's great metropolises. There's something quite uncanny to pictures of places of human habitation stripped of the presence of its original purpose and context. There's something about this that clearly relates to the fascination with ruins but photos of this kind are more concerned with that absence (in the manner of a novel like Day of the Triffids or a film like 28 Days Later) than with transfiguration through the process of decay.
posted by Richard 7:35 pm
