Alec Soth Interview on Conscientious
I missed this interview with Alec Soth a few weeks back. (Joerg's mixture of politics and photography puts me off his site for months at a time.)
Photography is essentially a cliché-making machine... I don't think it is healthy for a photographer to altogether run away from clichés -- just as I don't think it is wise for any kind of artist to try and do something entirely new. We are all working within a language and tradition. To avoid that language is to speak gibberish.
Because of the volume of images we experience in our day to day existence, avoiding cliche seems nearly impossible. Repeition drives meaning out of both subjects and techniques. Sometimes I find that my own attempts to avoid cliche cause me to freeze up, to avoid taking a picture for fear it's been taken too many times already. I suppose I intend for this "discretion" to be a good thing and drive me to see uniquely, but after reading The Ongoing Moment last spring, I've been trying to loosen up that fear and realize that it's unavoidable to make pictures similar to others' and only by recognizing that can a photographer move beyond to put his/her own imprint on the subject/technique/etc.
Oh, and Alec now has a blog.
Great post! And if I may add...from that original interview on Conscientous - further - Soth responds to a question about photographic clichés AS: " ... I always find myself brushing up against photo clichés. It is a huge battle. The reason is that photography is essentially a cliché-making machine. Once upon a time it wasn't a cliché to photograph an old barn or white picket fence. But a thousand people did it and now it is embarrassing. But while today it makes a bad picture, millions of people now find old barns beautiful (I suspect this wasn't the case fifty years ago). The same goes for old cars in Cuba and so many other things."
I found the honesty enlightening in the response... - I think that it may be just as possible to realize that clichés are essentially what we tend to most easily recognize in our image culture - a sort of currency - a reflection upon a kind of zeitgeist..... like the profane familiarity of a McDonald's... comfort food - flattening and fattening our collective lives.... Why not the cliché as an honest point of entry into a subject - perhaps it's a way into finding out something deeper about ourselves....
Oh - and I have a particular affinity for barns and corn cribs - those are the things of which surround me and where I am in the Midwest ! I find that there maybe a challenge worth while to through out there..... an investigation through photographs of that cliché - But go ahead... I dare you to try to make a picture - can it be made "fresh" and acceptable ?
Kudos for a willingness to risk investigating your own particular cliché !!
One of the biggest clichés in photography is how someone approaches a subject--how they descibe what they see. How many German photographers use the Becher approach to seeing?
Your snide aside re: Conscientious is really inappropropriate. Not everyone believes that ART occupies some rarified, autonomous space - as though galleries and museums and such are without politics or ecocnomics. In fact, it is pretty clear historically that "art photography" as a category (as distinct from "documentary", say) is simply an invention for political purposes - namely to get photographs into museums.
I'd hardly call my comment re: Conscientous "snide". And if Joerg's political commentary was actually relevent to photography that would be one thing, but he generally just intermingles his photo posts with a point of view I simply don't care to read.
Take a stroll through the archives here, you'll see that I certainly agree that art is not separate from politics or economics. Photography, of all the arts, is perhaps the least rarified, most accessible and the most intermingled with politics and economics.
The problem with intermingling politics with images is that is does not bring clear insight into either politics or art or photography--it just causes confusion. My impression is that it's done simply to lecture to a captive audience. Remember being stuck in a car for hours listening to uncle Frank?
Thanks for pointing out Alec's Blog.. I missed it, and itlooks great.
At what point does something become cliche? At the point where suddenly you're sick of seeing something? If this is the case then something becomes cliche the second time I see it, these days.
On my blog I sometimes post images that I have combined from multiple negatives. I came up with this 'bright idea' just by playing around in photoshop. Then One day I stumbled across vincent debanne. And I saw the same type of combinations. Now I have no enthusiasm to do the multiple thingies anymore, I feel the technique has already become common, cliche perhaps.
I must say the overwhelming quantity of imagery out there makes it next to impossible to do something someone else has not thought of. Even if one does have a mind of ones own.
@ Philip - I'm surprised - It seems that you may believe that it is possible to do something totally original and new.... !! Good luck with that - I hope you can get there. In the meantime - I wouldn't be afraid to go ahead and do something - anything is better than nothing...!
I have to share a qoute attributed to Chuck Close during an interview by Joe Fig - (Plus Ultra Gallery, NY)
"CC: Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work and the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will, through work, bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never dream up if you were just sitting around looking for a great art idea. And that a belief in that the process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel everyday. Today you know what you will do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday and tomorrow you are going to do what you did today and at least for a certain period of time if you can just work to hang in there, you will get somewhere."
I think you've hit the nail on the head (to bring in a cliche). It's interesting, though, I don't feel that way with my 'straight' photos, which I continue to produce regardless. Perhaps, I built up 'my new discovery', amongst the digital hype, so much that finding it replicated made the disappointment all the greater. It was only a technique really. Won't hold me back though. Thanks for the observation!
Originality, though is an interesting topic. I'd like to think about that some more. It recently occurred to me that, in fact there is too much original stuff, that each discovery has not even been fully explored before it is cast upon the wayside.