Szarkowski Interview in LA Books (link)
Why is that such a good picture? It’s a stupid question, but it actually is the question, isn’t it?
… Some photographers think the idea is enough. I told a good story in my Getty talk, a beautiful story, to the point: Ducasse says to his friend Mallarmé — I think this is a true story — he says, “You know, I’ve got a lot of good ideas for poems, but the poems are never very good.” Mallarmé says, “Of course, you don’t make poems out of ideas, you make poems out of words.” Really good, huh? Really true. So, photographers who aren’t so good think that you make photographs out of ideas. And they generally get only about halfway to the photograph and think that they’re done.
A related question came up after seeing the Getty show, thinking about an Eggleston, which is often so sharp and so poignant, and a lot of those, which are very similar, but feel — Flat.
Yeah, flat.
What is the difference?
A lot of it is just idea mongering. Well, I shouldn’t say a lot of it. The weaker stuff. You think, okay, that’s interesting, and it’s flat, and, of course, that brings us halfway to modern if it’s flat, because modern is flat, right? The whole tradition of modern painting has to do with flatness. So you march straight up to the building, and you get some letters that might be fairly interesting as letters, and maybe they say something that you think possibly has got a little bit of ironic valence. Or a photograph of a building that has been influenced by people whose taste is inferior to your own. You know, that kind of shooting-fish-in-a-barrel sort of thing. And without any affection, without any attempt to understand.
‘Ironic valence’! How could you not love this man? He perfectly summarises the deadness of so much academic conceptual art. There is a real drive to taking pictures of a theory, instead of exploring an idea, or situation through the photography itself. Photography is not a take home exam. It’s a pop quiz.
But it’s not just that the photographer comes with ideas and that the ideas are so simplistic (they tell you nothing new, and nothing interesting). Sometimes they proudly come with no ideas at all. There is a fear of saying anything at all, because we know, through our excellent collections of the past, that all of it has been said before. Granted, this is a major barrier of entry to art these days. But you have to sneak in, jump the fence, or lie to the bouncers to get in.
There’s always something to say. People are always falling in love, out of love, getting hurt, going away, a million things to think about, to say something about.
Oh, and Szarkowski’s mo. I’m so in lust.
Click on the link in the heading.
Posted 2 years ago
