Just Like An Ad…

We have been warned millions of times not to interpret the past in the light of current states of mind because our ancestors were different from us. We abuse history when we view it from the vantage point of our own age, which we presume to be more intelligent and enlightened. Personally I’m not so sure if this cultural superiority is justified. Why should we assume that our ancestors were different from ourselves? What if they were not? What if the people of the past, in every culture and period, were exactly the same as us, in values, temperament, personality, subconscious yearnings, dreams and aspirations? Human behaviour of the old times was motivated by exactly the same forces that operate today; therefore, if we need to discuss the truth of the past in the light of current motivations, we need to be clear about the present culture: Nowadays it is all about advertising. Period. As a test, walk through any shopping mall and notice how many goods are emblazoned with the trade-names and logos of their manufacturers. My point is that the divisions (themselves the most creative constructs of artists) between art and advertising are meaningless. The boundary between the two things cannot be erected because there is no dividing line. This has always been true. Art, even so-called Fine Art, is no different in principle or spirit from advocacy. Chances are that our ancient predecessors, like us, were equally complicitous in the selling/buying pact. Throughout most of history, painters were paid to promote the prince or church or other patron. They made commercials, in exactly the same way and for the same reasons as today’s film directors Woody Allen, Spike Lee, David Lynch, Ridley Scott or others make commercials to please their corporate paymasters. The only factors that have changed are who owns the wealth to commission art, and the ability of that art to reach vastly more viewers than those actually standing in front of the original. That is why practically all art history textbooks are so ridiculous. They talk about solitary genius, iconography, stylistic movements and artistic influences, with only brief asides on patronage (Michelangelo) and politics (Goya). They all miss the important issue: Money. Art takes place when there is surplus wealth which can be spent on the promotion of an institution, product or person. It is no coincidence that the major centers of art production throughout history have been the centers of thriving commerce. It is no coincidence that in recent times New York has produced more “art” than Kandahar. But photography “for the masses” changed all that, right? Wrong! The invention and early history of photography is rooted in economics. Without the newly wealthy middle class in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution there would have been no need for an oil paintings substitute. Photography was invented, developed, made by and sold to those with surplus wealth, the nouveau riche of the Victorian Age. Which is the reason why the endearing but misguided attempts of multiculturalists are doomed to frustration: You cannot “balance” the ethnicity of early photography and this is not because of prejudice or discrimination, but because people in a survival situation do not produce art or photography. They cannot afford to do so. Only when there is enough surplus wealth, a culture (such as our own) can afford to siphon off otherwise productive citizens and allow them to become fine artists, in order to promote their own or someone else’s egos. But let us quick cut to the present days for a few examples. One of the biggest myths of contemporary photography is that of the solitary genius who is in opposition to corporate money-grubbing. Nonsense: The corporate world is way ahead of that. It has embraced rebelliousness and spirituality as slogans and created a climate where you can indulge a private fantasy about being a non-conformist if your dissent is confirmed by choosing to buy a specific product. Clever. This idea of non-conformity as a sales device is so pervasive, insidious and suffused within the culture that it is ironic that rebelliousness against corporations is being created by market strategists. Rebelliousness is not anti-establishment; it is the sales pitch of the establishment. And the Rebel is now the name of a camera by Canon! I know… You are saying to yourself that the photographs used in today’s advertisements are not made by artists but by commercial hacks. Or, if they were made by artists, then they are appropriated posthumously and, presumably without their approval. That is true in some cases. If ever there was a non-conformist, spiritually-minded genius in modern photography it was Bill Brandt. After fifteen years of solitary creation he produced Perspective of Nudes, a landmark publication, which was almost universally panned by the critics. But the reviews did not disturb Brandt nearly so much as the fact that advertisers quickly stole the idea and imitated distortions to sell all manner of products. However, it would be a mistake to suggest that fine-artists do not or would not sell their personal pictures to be used in advertisements. Examples are legions, from Ansel Adams’ wilderness image on a coffee can to Joel Meyerowitz’s Cape Cod photograph selling Adobe Photoshop, the list is endless. Hundreds of fine-artists are daily pitching their work as advertising and corporations prepay them to produce art, hence aligning commercial interests with the rebel-artist syndrome. A fitting example is the “Barbie” series of large Polaroid-style prints produced by David Levinthal. These have been exhibited, promoted, and sold by major art galleries throughout the entire world. The exhibition can also be seen in a book. This merely illustrates that art and advertising are not as dissimilar as usually assumed. I have heard gallery directors actually say that Levinthal has perpetuated a crafty scam on Mattel: The lone artist makes art which criticizes a product while getting the manufacturer to pay for it… But do you really think that Mattel is not aware of this? Of course it is: Mattel is a player in the rebel-artist stakes, and reaping the benefits of all the free publicity. However, Levinthal has not been singled out for special criticism: He is merely a prominent example of the syndrome. Other artists are more than willing to aid and abet the advertising process. Indeed a special agency was created just for this purpose. The Swanstock picture agency took already completed projects by fine artists and sold the results for commercial purposes. So successful was the idea that the agency was bought out by Image Bank, one of the biggest commercial picture agencies in the world. Image Bank is owned by Kodak. But you are right in that there are many undiscovered artists out there who are pursuing their own visions without regard to such commercial interests. That is why they are unknown and likely to remain so. Remember the old definition of a liberal: “A conservative who has not yet been mugged”. The artist-photographer is an advertising photographer who has not yet been economically mugged, but hopes to be and then will claim that he/she is cleverly subverting the system. By now the conclusion must be clear: There is no intrinsic difference between advertising and art. John Updike, the literary guru, once said that advertisements were “the aesthetic marvels of our age”. It would be hard to disagree, and I say that not in anger, or sorrow but as a fact of life. It is a cliché to say that the best television commercials are incomparably better than the actual programs, and clichés are clichés because they are all basically true.

It’s Only Love

Why do we like the pictures we like? This is a question that has long interested me, and I was pleased to discover that our tastes in image-picking are actually being formed at a very young age. Kids clearly choose bright colors over black and white images; appreciating monochrome comes later in life and, even then, people differ in how much B/W they can “tolerate”. Colors aside, young children start to show a preference for certain illustrations of their culture by age two. Around the same time they begin to develop specialized speech processing. At first, children tend to like simple pictures, with clearly defined shape and pattern progressions, which resolve in direct and easily predictable ways. As they mature, they start to get tired of “easy” images and search for some that holds more challenge. There are, however, individual differences: not all children like photos in the first place, while some develop a taste that is off the beaten path. Scientific studies of like and dislike across a variety of aesthetic domains, such of painting, poetry, dance, and music, have shown that an orderly relationship exists between the complexity of an artistic work and how much we like it. Of course, complexity is an entirely subjective concept. In order for the notion to make any sense, we have to allow for the idea that what seems impenetrably complex to someone might fall right in the “sweet spot” of preference for someone else, based on differences in background, experience, understanding, and cognitive schemas. Speaking from my own experience I have found this to be the case. There are visual works like some early Adams that bore me because they are so predictable. Even for the ones that I have never seen, I feel that I could complete every single section of the photo in my head before my eye could go to the next one. When an image is too predictable, and contains no element of surprise, we find it unchallenging and simplistic. As our eyes sweep through (particularly if we are engaged with focused attention), our brain is thinking ahead to what the different possibilities for the next part of the image are, where the picture is going, its trajectory, its intended direction, and its ultimate end point. Schemas are everything: they frame our understanding; they’re the system into which we place the elements and interpretations of an aesthetic object. Schemas inform our cognitive models and expectation. As an example, let’s take the work of a great Australian photographer: Imants Krumins. For someone who possesses the “modern photography” schema the images are perfectly interpretable, even upon viewing them for the first time. Lacking a proper schema, Imant’s imagery seems nonsensical or perhaps rambling, one visual idea melding amorphously into the next, with no boundaries, no beginnings or endings that appear as part of a coherent whole. At a neural level, we need to be able to find a few landmarks in order to invoke a cognitive schema. If we see something radically new enough times, some of that piece of work will eventually become encoded in our brains and we will develop landmarks. Our image viewing creates schemas for visual genres and forms, even when we are only watching passively, and not attempting to analyze the image. By an early age, we know what the “legal” moves are in the imagery of our culture. For many, our future likes and dislikes will be a consequence of the types of cognitive schemas we formed for pictures through childhood viewing. This isn’t meant to imply that the photos we watch as children will necessarily determine or visual tastes for the rest of our lives. Many people are exposed to, or study imagery of different cultures and styles and become acculturated to them, learning their schemas as well. The point is that our early exposure is often our most profound, and becomes the foundation for further understanding. So why do we like the pictures we like? Neuroscience hasn’t given us an answer yet, but I choose to believe that it’s only love; However, these are interesting concepts to think about.

Photography Is Not Art

“Professors” and “Professionals” might share the same linguistic root, but that is just about all that they have in common. Often the professional photographer sees the professor in academia as a picture-taker who was too incompetent to make it in the professional ranks, or as a lazy dilettante, uncaringly playing with superficial ideas while the mainstream rushes by, more concerned with reacting to images with a meaningless pseudo-intellectual jargon than with exploring the medium of photography in any significant way. It follows that the impoverished students from academic institutions of photography are amazingly inept, at everything, and only fitted to find teaching positions in order to foist similar banalities onto another generation of students. On the other hand, professional photographers tend to be ignored by academia as mere hacks who, because of lack of intelligence, moral scruples or wilful ignorance of the medium’s history and aesthetic issues, have compromised with commerce, sold out, reduced themselves to common tradesmen. The professionals, it is implied, have squandered photography’s rich heritage in order to pander to the demands of a client. Money, not love of the medium, rules their hearts; “give the public or the clients the crap they want” is their motivating cry. Professionals, it is claimed, deserve to be ignored by academia because they have nothing to offer young photographers in terms of issues, ideas or inspiration. Have I exaggerated the situation? Perhaps. But all of us have heard similar sentiments expressed by both professors and professionals. One fact that is not in dispute is that there is a widening gulf opening up between art and commercial photography, between professors and professionals. It is abundantly clear that art programs in photography are becoming increasingly isolated and incestuous, and are in imminent danger of becoming totally irrelevant. At this point, therefore, I should like to take a personal stance. There is some truth, and a lot of misconceptions, in the attitudes of both professors and professionals as previously outlined, but the responsibilities for creating this alienation lie within the academia. This remark deserves certainly more explanation than space permits in this context. However, here are a few notes as the basis of my assertion: The idea of teaching photography-as-art in colleges and universities is of relatively recent origin and it was not until the 1960s that the real explosion of photographic education took place. One of the most influential educators of that time declared: “I do not know how to train artists or photographers, but I do know how to train assistant professors”. The result was that colleges churned out teachers, not photographers, which had a profound effect on the medium’s recent history and led to alienation between academics and professionals. Inevitably. When teachers train new teachers how to produce yet more teachers, a closed world is created. Most academics arrive at their college or university positions straight from an educational institution and therefore have no experience, knowledge, or interest in the world of the professional. It seems foolish to expect them to forge links with a field of which they know nothing. Also, most photography courses are located in art departments, where the air is permeated with the ideas, issues, attitudes and history of art, meaning painting, printmaking, sculpture, etc., but not photography. In these particular (art) environments, life is more amenable that way. Having created a closed, self-serving (and historically new) field of photography, the art establishment was quick to produce service organizations for this system. Lecture funds brought other teachers from academia to talk to the students; Exhibitions were organized, but only by and for academic art photographers; Galleries opened up to sell art photography; Museums began to buy photographs, primarily by academic/artists; Grants and fellowships were offered to photographers, usually those who had an academic base because the selection committees comprised fellow teachers. And so on… My point is that a specialized area of photography, comprising art academics, has arisen in the past few decades which is totally new in the history of the medium and has, by choice and definition, very little connection with photography as practiced by professionals since 1839. Revealing the wisdom of my age, I will confidently predict that the situation will: 1) Stay the same; 2) Change. If the situation stays the same, as I think it’s likely, then the gulf of misunderstanding between professors and professionals will widen. Many will say that this, too, is inevitable and laudable. Advocates of art and academia will state that photography is a potent tool in the hands of artists and that a closer relationship between photography and the other arts is long overdue. Because the advocates of this position have only breathed the rarefied air of art schools I can sympathize with the reasons why they would feel this way. But I still disagree. Photography, at its best, is not art: Photography is photography. It has its own rich history, unique characteristics, singular strengths (and weaknesses) and clearly defined principles, most of which are not shared by any other visual art. By denying its basic, core principles in the name of Art, photography is in danger of becoming impotent. My fear is that photography-as-art in academia is quickly becoming irrelevant in the mainstream of photography and that future history will accord it merely a footnote. I hope the situation will change. I hope academics will rejoin the photographic mainstream, by realizing that the vast majority of the best images in the history of the medium have been made by professionals. Let them admit that even their heroes and heroines in recent decades did not sneer at earning their living by doing what they did best: making photographs. Look at the careers of Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Weegee, Elliot Erwitt, and so on… The problem arises: Teachers are not professionals but they have to make the attempt, through lectures, workshops and exhibitions to introduce students to the work, ideas and attitudes of the very best professionals. They must build bridges of communication across the gulf toward the professional because the roots of their medium are on the other side, away from the artist. That will take a lot of courage. It is difficult to admit personal inadequacy and it is even more difficult to alter institutionalized habits. But the results will be worth the effort. Academic photography could be a place of affirmation of the principles of photography, a source of rejuvenation of the medium. Professionals have much to learn from the professors; Professors have even more to learn from the professionals.