 |
 |
Picture this . . .
We arrive at a point where we no longer afford ourselves the 'endless return': The 9 million photographs of babies & birthdays, vacations & graduations, loved-ones, pets, trees, and sunsets that are made and filed away every single day no longer are so necessary or integral to our quick anesthetized lives. In this post-modern world we invoke no ideals, nor give importance to the difference between yesterday and today. We are consumed by the drug-like blur of the ever racing present.
Or this . . .
All cameras are fully automatic. They no longer have viewfinders or the qualitative options of depth-of-field and shutter speeds. Like life, all film is high-speed. Photography is not about looking or seeing, but is instead a ritual gesture of information gathering accompanied by flashing lights and whirring motors. A standard camera with built-in calculator and clock-radio costs $12; a "roll of film" costs $30, the batteries necessary to operate the camera cost $100.
Or this . . .
The same generic pictures are used over & over & over again in advertising. Archetypal imagery becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Only the 250 officially sanctioned photographs from the Newhall-Szarkowski archive can be shown in museums and galleries, or published in art magazines. These pictures are also licensed for use by artists and students for their work. Personal photography, self expression is banned. The National Endowment funds only official re-photographic projects. The 'Photographic Society' shows only work that has been funded by the National Endowment. Schools that harbor self-expression lose their funding. Artists who practice offensive or unauthorized self-expression are fined and black-balled. Tax-payers designate on their income-tax returns whether to contribute any of their tax dollars to "the arts".
Our children are raised on images of horror, real and imagined. Their models are steroid heroes and heroines with identical health club bodies. The pictorial arts take a back seat to the martial arts in the aspirations of youth. Automatic weapons, toy and real, are far more common than cameras in their hands. Cartoons, with their inevitable toy spin-offs, have replaced funny animals with brutal mutants whose super-powers never include creativity.
All fashion is power-fashion; all hair-dos are big. Of what use are the subtle, passive pleasures of photography? This brave new world of bigger, faster living through chemistry, of meltdowns, missle deployments, stealth bombers, and cyber-chip implants has easily superceded the weak drama of 'fine art photography'.
And what was this 'fine art photography' that seemed so romantically important? That we ghetto-ized ourselves for? Chemically poisoned ourselves to accomplish? That we stayed up nights arguing and writing statements like this about? Wasn't it something concerning the freedom to see whatever could be seen (and even what could not), to test the limits of visual poetry, to find a voice for our passions, our politics, our nightmares?
Yesterday a student asked me if "all good photographers were anal". Perhaps that is a quality that binds us in our necessity. Perhaps, though, its also the quality that blinds us to the narrowing of our options. The society that has become afraid of ideas is quick to take advantage of our weakness. Censorship is easy to impose on picture-makers whose primary concerns seem to be format, surface, resolution, and archival processing techniques.
On the other hand, picture this . . .
A culture that nurtures choice, encourages questioning, supports the artist's need to make his or her own path; a system which rewards excellence, invention, and risk-taking rather than mediocrity, redundancy, and the narcotic slumbers of the market and museum; a critical environment that values art and artist more than it's own pontification; an art school that is allowed to evolve it's own sense of aesthetics and responsibility; artists who are not afraid to practice, even celebrate, their freedom; a world where technology services this freedom, where the difference between yesterday and today is important, where banning is banned.
Picture this, if you still can.
Fred Endsley
Chicago, IL
July 21, 1989
|
|