RonPrice
November 13th, 2007, 06:10 AM
This piece may be a bit too long for many readers here. To them, I apologize and advise they just pass it by. If, perchance, a reader is stimulated by the first paragraph or two, then reading on is, of course, adviseable.-Ron Price, Tasmania.
______________________________
Kodak has closed its film laboratories and processing plants in Britain and the United States since the turn of the millennium. At this point in the twenty-first century, however, we can still look back on 150 years of a familiar and domestic photographic technology; and I can look back on 100 years of black-and-white prints, the little-changing record of my affinal and consanguineal family's life, my Bahá’í family or at least that part of it that got in front of a camera while I was around and a wide range of friends and associations beginning in 1947. The power of revelation due to photography is undeniable. My photos look back on a very small section of 99 years(1908-2007) of that century and a half within the confines of my family, friends and many of the landscapes where I have lived, moved and had my being.
I have been working on this essay on photography for nearly a decade now, since the late 1990s. It finally has a form that is useful and, although not entirely satisfactory, it is appropriate to include in my autobiography. Much more work on this essay is required, but its relevance to my autobiography has at last some clarity to me and so I include it in the fifth edition of my memoirs entitled: Pioneering Over Four Epochs. I have found the content of this essay one of the most intricate and complex of all the sections of this autobiographical narrative but, because the ideas are important to me--and I hope to some readers--I want to include them. The ability of photography to record some of the types of the minutiae of my social life, indeed some of the central aspectsof my life, makes it an ideal method for dealing with a number of features of the autobiographical process and some of the complexity and richness of my human situation. Many people see much more in photos than they ever do in written text; for these people, my photographs and the commentary are indispensable. Of course, as Andre Malreau once said, “Images do not make up a life story; nor do events. It is the narrative illusion, the biographical work, that creates the life story.”
The human tendency to look at, to be drawn to, the pictures, the photos, before the print seems universal--at least in my experience. Vision and perception are active ingredients in the creation of understanding. When we observe something, then we reach for it; we move through space, touch things, feel their surfaces and contours. Our perception structures and orders the information given by things into determinable forms. We understand because this structuring and ordering is a part of our relationship with reality. Without order we couldn't understand at all. The world is not just raw material; it is already ordered merely by being observed. And photography helps in this ordering process; indeed, our very way of looking at so much of the world is now determined, in part at least, by photographs. Photography gives us an immense amount of experience that normally would be outside our range. The fragment is so often elevated from irrelevance to positions of some priviledge. We are able to see what we looked like as children for the first time in the last century and a half, since the birth of the photo in 1826.
The photos are full of vanished details of the way life was lived – the styles of chairs, of clothes, of hats and bathing costumes, of accessories like spectacles – and of a wide range of intriguing bits of human activity. As one critic put it, photographs may stimulate, inspire, or seem to document autobiography, but whether they in fact do is another question.
Here are two prose-poems that place this subject of photography in what I hope is a helpful perspective:
______________
TELLING THE STORY
Most of us, without particularly meaning to, have accumulated--from commercials, from ads in magazines, from picture books, from movies--a mental archive of images of the West, a personal West-in-the-Mind’s eye in which we see an eternal pastoral, very beautiful but usually unpeopled. These potent images, pelting us decade after decade, finally implant notions about how the West was explored and developed, in a word, won that are unrealistic. Photography has helped to redress the balance little by little with its rich but disordered resource. Over the last seventy years studies of various kinds and the occasional autobiography, like We Pointed Them North(1939), have helped to alter the picture that is engraved on all our brains from TV and the movies: Roy Rogers, Gene Autrey, the Lone Ranger, Butch Cassidy, et al.-Ron Price with thanks to Larry McMurtry, “High Noon”, a review of The New Encyclopedia of the American West, editor Howard R. Lamar, Yale UP, in The Australian Review of Books, December 1998, pp.17-19.
Defining character,
determining worth,
touching on the personal,
bringing people out of
verbal concrete,
through understanding.
Needing an eye
for telling detail,
a certain dramatic power,
analysis and interpretation,
with incisiveness and conviction,
with no doubt about its being true,
a willingness to deal with the unpleasant,
for we need more than a glimpse.
We need the story of the saintliness
in all its unsaintliness.
It is as difficult to write
a good life as to live one.
We want to know we are not alone:
for the community is its own ritual,
the greatest drama in the world of existence,
something forever new and unforeseen,
devoid, in writing, of appearances and pretentions,
a mysterious development, this writing, of many values,
conveying to the reading public insight
and a knowing who they are into their lives.
For a great life does not make a great book--
for does it make a great photograph.
Ron Price
1 February 1999
___________________________
A DOCUMENT, A RECORD
The Metropolitan Museum of Art held a retrospective in April 2000 on the photographical work of Walker Evans. I know nothing about Mr. Evans, but his photography was an interesting document on his times, a record of his days and years, the sentiments and styles in the first half century of American history and a personal autobiography. The brief summary I saw, perhaps ten minutes, on The News Hour with Tim Lehrer went by so quickly I did not catch it all. But it had something to say, indirectly, about my own autobiographical work. -Ron Price with thanks to The News Hour with Tim Lehrer, 5:00-6:00 pm, 7 April 2000.
Showing my world as I see it:
a poet warrior, heavily armed
with the stuff of my life,
my world, my religion—
my playful and not-so-playful
energies, moods and desires--
a document over three epochs,
a record of my days, not so plain
and simple, clear and visually
straight from the shoulder as
this fellow Walker Evan’s work.
But, with Keats, an almost instant
transmutation of impressions, thoughts,
reading and ideas into poetry, well,
what some might call poetry, what
I might see as a study for poetry.1
1 See Robert Gittings, Selected Poems and Letters of Keats, Heinemann Books Ltd., London, 1981(1966), pp.8-11.
Ron Price
7 April 2000
(revised for:
Open Photography Forums
14/11/07)
______________________
The Gestalt psychologist attests that only the organization of materials into a concrete and meaningful image can fully express and communicate the whole of universal experience. Without this direct portrayal of awareness and nature, the art stands incomplete within the natural world, and therefore is nothing. All continued human activity, of which photography is but one, requires a continued supply of activating energy, and no energy comes forth without a motive. The effect of photography is not what I see in, say, my vacation snapshots, but a tendency to see only the present as something that exists; our human energy seems to focus on the now. And of course only the present can be photographically recorded. The rest of time, the past and the future, exists only in the imagination. Old pictures show an old present. Photograph albums tend to produce in the viewers a permanent now, a continuous present. I think this was, not so much a dominant attitude, as a daring and for me a useful affirmation.
__________
______________________________
Kodak has closed its film laboratories and processing plants in Britain and the United States since the turn of the millennium. At this point in the twenty-first century, however, we can still look back on 150 years of a familiar and domestic photographic technology; and I can look back on 100 years of black-and-white prints, the little-changing record of my affinal and consanguineal family's life, my Bahá’í family or at least that part of it that got in front of a camera while I was around and a wide range of friends and associations beginning in 1947. The power of revelation due to photography is undeniable. My photos look back on a very small section of 99 years(1908-2007) of that century and a half within the confines of my family, friends and many of the landscapes where I have lived, moved and had my being.
I have been working on this essay on photography for nearly a decade now, since the late 1990s. It finally has a form that is useful and, although not entirely satisfactory, it is appropriate to include in my autobiography. Much more work on this essay is required, but its relevance to my autobiography has at last some clarity to me and so I include it in the fifth edition of my memoirs entitled: Pioneering Over Four Epochs. I have found the content of this essay one of the most intricate and complex of all the sections of this autobiographical narrative but, because the ideas are important to me--and I hope to some readers--I want to include them. The ability of photography to record some of the types of the minutiae of my social life, indeed some of the central aspectsof my life, makes it an ideal method for dealing with a number of features of the autobiographical process and some of the complexity and richness of my human situation. Many people see much more in photos than they ever do in written text; for these people, my photographs and the commentary are indispensable. Of course, as Andre Malreau once said, “Images do not make up a life story; nor do events. It is the narrative illusion, the biographical work, that creates the life story.”
The human tendency to look at, to be drawn to, the pictures, the photos, before the print seems universal--at least in my experience. Vision and perception are active ingredients in the creation of understanding. When we observe something, then we reach for it; we move through space, touch things, feel their surfaces and contours. Our perception structures and orders the information given by things into determinable forms. We understand because this structuring and ordering is a part of our relationship with reality. Without order we couldn't understand at all. The world is not just raw material; it is already ordered merely by being observed. And photography helps in this ordering process; indeed, our very way of looking at so much of the world is now determined, in part at least, by photographs. Photography gives us an immense amount of experience that normally would be outside our range. The fragment is so often elevated from irrelevance to positions of some priviledge. We are able to see what we looked like as children for the first time in the last century and a half, since the birth of the photo in 1826.
The photos are full of vanished details of the way life was lived – the styles of chairs, of clothes, of hats and bathing costumes, of accessories like spectacles – and of a wide range of intriguing bits of human activity. As one critic put it, photographs may stimulate, inspire, or seem to document autobiography, but whether they in fact do is another question.
Here are two prose-poems that place this subject of photography in what I hope is a helpful perspective:
______________
TELLING THE STORY
Most of us, without particularly meaning to, have accumulated--from commercials, from ads in magazines, from picture books, from movies--a mental archive of images of the West, a personal West-in-the-Mind’s eye in which we see an eternal pastoral, very beautiful but usually unpeopled. These potent images, pelting us decade after decade, finally implant notions about how the West was explored and developed, in a word, won that are unrealistic. Photography has helped to redress the balance little by little with its rich but disordered resource. Over the last seventy years studies of various kinds and the occasional autobiography, like We Pointed Them North(1939), have helped to alter the picture that is engraved on all our brains from TV and the movies: Roy Rogers, Gene Autrey, the Lone Ranger, Butch Cassidy, et al.-Ron Price with thanks to Larry McMurtry, “High Noon”, a review of The New Encyclopedia of the American West, editor Howard R. Lamar, Yale UP, in The Australian Review of Books, December 1998, pp.17-19.
Defining character,
determining worth,
touching on the personal,
bringing people out of
verbal concrete,
through understanding.
Needing an eye
for telling detail,
a certain dramatic power,
analysis and interpretation,
with incisiveness and conviction,
with no doubt about its being true,
a willingness to deal with the unpleasant,
for we need more than a glimpse.
We need the story of the saintliness
in all its unsaintliness.
It is as difficult to write
a good life as to live one.
We want to know we are not alone:
for the community is its own ritual,
the greatest drama in the world of existence,
something forever new and unforeseen,
devoid, in writing, of appearances and pretentions,
a mysterious development, this writing, of many values,
conveying to the reading public insight
and a knowing who they are into their lives.
For a great life does not make a great book--
for does it make a great photograph.
Ron Price
1 February 1999
___________________________
A DOCUMENT, A RECORD
The Metropolitan Museum of Art held a retrospective in April 2000 on the photographical work of Walker Evans. I know nothing about Mr. Evans, but his photography was an interesting document on his times, a record of his days and years, the sentiments and styles in the first half century of American history and a personal autobiography. The brief summary I saw, perhaps ten minutes, on The News Hour with Tim Lehrer went by so quickly I did not catch it all. But it had something to say, indirectly, about my own autobiographical work. -Ron Price with thanks to The News Hour with Tim Lehrer, 5:00-6:00 pm, 7 April 2000.
Showing my world as I see it:
a poet warrior, heavily armed
with the stuff of my life,
my world, my religion—
my playful and not-so-playful
energies, moods and desires--
a document over three epochs,
a record of my days, not so plain
and simple, clear and visually
straight from the shoulder as
this fellow Walker Evan’s work.
But, with Keats, an almost instant
transmutation of impressions, thoughts,
reading and ideas into poetry, well,
what some might call poetry, what
I might see as a study for poetry.1
1 See Robert Gittings, Selected Poems and Letters of Keats, Heinemann Books Ltd., London, 1981(1966), pp.8-11.
Ron Price
7 April 2000
(revised for:
Open Photography Forums
14/11/07)
______________________
The Gestalt psychologist attests that only the organization of materials into a concrete and meaningful image can fully express and communicate the whole of universal experience. Without this direct portrayal of awareness and nature, the art stands incomplete within the natural world, and therefore is nothing. All continued human activity, of which photography is but one, requires a continued supply of activating energy, and no energy comes forth without a motive. The effect of photography is not what I see in, say, my vacation snapshots, but a tendency to see only the present as something that exists; our human energy seems to focus on the now. And of course only the present can be photographically recorded. The rest of time, the past and the future, exists only in the imagination. Old pictures show an old present. Photograph albums tend to produce in the viewers a permanent now, a continuous present. I think this was, not so much a dominant attitude, as a daring and for me a useful affirmation.
__________