My Photography is Meaningless

This is rather a grandiose & self-effacing statement, that certainly needs much explanation. But for the general purpose of this passage, my photography is meaningless.

The images from my projects aren’t of war, they aren’t of great human suffering of any kind that normally are the by-product of photojournalism. They aren’t to elicit the great beauty of the individual or of the inanimate as such of fashion photography. Their closest but still alienated genre of photography would be documentary photography, but the aim of documentary is to convey a story or a subject that the author/photographer believes should be told.

Instead, my photography does none of this. It makes no attempt to communicate a dire human situation to the mass public. It makes no attempt to convey beautiful, no matter how superficial, to the consumer. It makes no direct attempt to be a historical document of a particular time & place. It misses all of this to achieve one, singular, aim. For all of these reasons above, my photography is absolutely & unapologetically, meaningless.

I’ve always been someone who’s found great difficulty in articulating my emotional response to a given stimulus (though I’m very hesitant for this piece to become a psychological analysis, so I won’t dither & elaborate on the reasons for this for another word). The general repression of such emotion becomes difficult almost immediately, when trying to convey to someone the sentimental affect of a situation in your life. To be able to share an emotional response to an environment with another human being is one of the most fundamentally comforting experiences for people, & my inability to effectively do this was stunting my ability to empathise & to give real meaning to moments in my life.

What I would describe as my single motivation behind my photography is an attempt at capturing what I have sentimentally named a fleeting moment of glory. Everyone has them, they occur in daily life. These flashing moments of pure emotional feeling, it doesn’t have to be happiness, it doesn’t have to be melancholy, it just has to have such an overwhelming effect on your emotional wellbeing that for that very moment you stop in your tracks. When you think back on them, the moment seems to be dragged out over the course of minutes, hours. You think back to the single moment that occurred that hit you, that made you want it to last infinite amounts of time. I love & have always loved these moments & I am wholeheartedly convinced they are one of the most sacred & sensuous attributes that we possess as human beings.

Of course, within my own conscious flow, all these moments have an almost earth-shattering effect on me. My inability to communicate them effectively does not detract from the sentimental value of them in myself. These fleeting moments of enduring ecstasy, that pass by in an instant, have been a constant source of inspiration to me for as long as I can remember. I used to hunt them down, I began actively searching for where I next might find one. Who I was with, where I was, what I was doing. I became obsessively fascinated in searching for these moments in my life. It became all-consuming & encompassing, which is when photography entered my life. Though the events were not related, they very quickly became intertwined.

This is why my photography is meaningless. By that, I don’t mean it in the very literal sense. They obviously serve some vague sense of purpose (even if, by my own admission, sometimes it is very strenuous), but they don’t serve a purpose in the conventional way that a photograph is captured to serve a purpose. As described earlier, the genres of photography (which have become quite obsolete in the last few decades & therefore I reference them incredibly loosely) have been set up & established for the use of very specific, unequivocal information communication. The emotional response from the viewer in these photographs is still incredibly loaded, but comes from the personal interaction with the information that is captured in this frame. Generally speaking, this is where the meaning comes from. The meaning for the shutter being fired, the meaning that necessitated the photograph being taken, developed, shared, exhibited. Whatever process the photograph has been through since the light passed through the lens, it all essentially comes down to this meaning.

This is where the bifurcation between some of my personal favourite photographers & the general domain of photography happens. Before the shutter was even fired, where did the meaning to take the photograph come from?

I truly, hand-on-heart believe, that in all of these photographers comes the hunt that I experienced when I was a young boy, that we all experience as part of our daily lives. The hunt for the fleeting moments of glory.

Alec Soth will forever & always be one of my favourite photographers, specifically for his methodology of capturing something that inspires him & fundamental construction of these moments between himself & the subject. He travels extensively, going into great detail with his subjects about their lives, their lifestyles, everything one must know in order to truly understand an environment, before he captures a photograph of the subject.

The element of his work that I have always been unmistakably envious about is his ability to go through his process, capture a photograph of the subject, but have the image filled with such compassion & empathy that it becomes uncomparably more potent than the documentary-nature & information communication of the photograph itself. A collaborative effort between the subjects that he chooses, his compositional choices & the extraordinary lengths that he goes to to create this intricate & delicate relationship between himself & his sitter, means that the amount of compassion that he is able to load into each frame is absolutely palpable. It’s difficult to look at one of his photographs without the compulsion to fall completely in love with the person, the place, the object- whatever it might be. Each photograph is an attempt to make you fall in love with the subject. The importance of this tendency & therefore of Soth’s work cannot by understated.

What’s quite interesting about this emotional phenomenon is that is has the ability at all to be communicated through a 2-dimensional artistic format. It seems such an oneiric & ephemeral experience that when you think about the philosophical nature of it, it seems inconceivable that the emotional weight of these moments would be communicable through the transfer of another format of storytelling. I’d have thought that as each of these moments was such an spontaneous & lived experience, that the affect would be lost in translation as the environment went from a live situation around you to either a painting or a photograph. To me & my experience in the consumption of art, the impressionists had the capability of capturing this moment & photographers have the ability to communicate it through their work.

I have this vivid memory of one particular photograph that absolutely struck me with its ability to convey this sensation to me in a raw & passionate manner. Alfred Stieglitz’s Winter, Fifth Avenue is a world far detached from mine. 19th Century New York to the modern day world isn’t exactly a whole other world, but there’s a fair amount of estrangement in the times & of the geopolitical situation of the world. The horse & carriage being pulled along Fifth Avenue isn’t an experience that I have ever been a part of, but the overwhelming sensation of the cold as it wraps around you in a complete embrace, almost comforting but never confronting is almost completely intoxicating.

There’s a plethora of photographic oeuvres with a large quantity of photographs that fulfil the specifications in terms of the sensuous response to the subject, but the element that makes it even more personal is that the emotional vigour of each photograph is variably dependent on the consumer. Depending on you, the viewer, your life experiences & the strength of your emotional attachments to particular places, subjects, environments, all affects the photograph’s influence on you as you look at it, as you experience it as a photograph.

Wolfgang Tillman’s oeuvre is another set of photographs that strikes you with sentimental patterns throughout the course of his work. His piece Burg from 1998 is an eclectic mix of cultural icons, lifestyle iconography & what it felt like to be 20-something through Europe in the 90s. Each one of the photographs from this series of work is absolutely loaded with emotional resonance & creates this great stir of empathy as you look at these lives lived, this lives truly lived, at an age where it felt the world was at your feet. The power of naïvety, the power of self-indulgence, the power of utter communal egocentrism is palpable through each frame.

The photographs in Burg have this dual emotional response. They give you the trill of the erotic, exotic, intoxicated lifestyle of Euro-grunge, but they also immediately transport you back to that time in your life, where your life was maybe somewhat less exotic, but you had the same lust for spontaneity & recklessness that is elicit in these photographs. It creates this powerful nostalgia, for the return of that moment, the appreciation of that moment. That fleeting moment of glory.

Which brings me all the way back to my own photography. If you didn’t live a life of urban impulsiveness, the general emotional affect of Tillman’s photographs loses its impact quite severely- same for the rural reclusiveness represented through Soth’s work (worth mentioning here that due to an incredibly fortuitous life I seem to have lived both sides of this coin & therefore feel immense joy from both of these auteurs). My photography, whilst absolutely incomparable to these monoliths of photographic endeavour, stands as an attempt at the same purpose.

There’s so much sentimentality in everyday life. An excess of emotional affect that, if it can be conveyed correctly, it can lay deep in whoever is looking at the photograph. All I want my photographs to do is elicit that in someone, anyone. Even myself. The people in my life, the places I’ve been, the things I’ve experienced. All of it is in the name of communicating what means something to me.