Mitch Alland
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 The opposite of "meaningless street photography"... | |
In this thread, I have posted five series, which you can see on this page, and watch each as an automatic slideshow: https://www.flickr.com/photos/malland/albums/. The first one (EXPOSED II) has the following concept statement:
EXPOSED II is an extension of my current exhibition project, titled EXPOSED. The latter is intended for hanging 34 large prints in vertical format on a long wall, with a concluding section (coda) of four horizontal photos to be hung at the end, on the lateral wall. Now, I’ve added six images to the four from the coda to form the EXPOSED II series.
The coda (and EXPOSED II) pulls EXPOSED together thematically and, stylistically, in terms of light and shadow—ending with the colossal sculpture of the dying Buddha going into nothingness (parinirvana), while the fine lines of the folds of his robe call back to life.
The basic ideas of EXPOSED and, now, EXPOSED II are: seeking visual narrative and immediacy, between light and shadow; getting away from the realm of words while finding signs as signifiers. All is “here,” all is “now,” all is connected. All about concentration and emptiness.
These feelings become concentrated in a series of ten photos, with the increased ambiguity that reflects contemporary life. In the first image: the light amid the dark shadows, the woman’s glance, her hand and the man’s repose; in the third image: the mother and daughter (in university uniform) closing up shop for the night, with shadow and light on their respective faces; dead chickens (second image) and dead fish (eighth image). But my feeling is that the images must, and do, speak for themselves and expose a meaning to the viewer like a poem does, without explication.
Many people will think of some the above statements as “art speak”— especially, All is “here,” all is “now,” all is connected. All about concentration and emptiness. I got to these ideas, some six years ago, whenI studied Daido Moriyama’s book, Light and Shadow, which he first published in 1982, ten years after his previous book, and three years after he stopped photographing altogether — a time in which he had been strung out on opioids. He got back to photographing after studying the first photograph ever made, the one by Niépce, which was an eight hour exposure of the view out of a window: it had a building and showed just light and shadow, which you can see here: https://allthatsinteresting.com/first-photo-ever-taken.
Moriyama then got started on his return to photography by shooting a macro of a peony on a dark, shadow background and continued with the concept of light and shadow, in his high-contrast style. The accompanying text in Light and Shadow describes how Moriyama, was taken with photographing objects and textures. However, rather than trying to illustrate an idea or concept through the objects — through his obsession with the objects themselves — Moriyama took photography as far as possible from the realm of words.
This idea is also expressed in Roland Barthes’ book about Japan, Empire of Signs: that meaning can be transmitted without words, without description, without explication — the way it is with photographs, or with haiku poems. Barthes asserts that Western art translates an impression into description; and he insists that Japanese haiku never describes feelings: in haiku it is the event and its image that predominates — the way it does in a photograph.
Taking this idea further, Barthes writes about the “frog haiku” that Basho, who trained as a Zen monk in his youth, wrote in 1688 (the most haiku in Japan, known to every schoolchild):
ancient pond—
frog leaps
sound of water
Barth writes: “We are told that it was this noise of this frog that wakened Basho to the truth of Zen. But this is too Western a way of speaking. Rather, Basho discovered in this noise, this splash, an end to language.” In Zen, briefly — I don’t want to go on to much about Zen — there is a moment when language ceases (after much meditation exercise) and it is in this echoless moment in the frog haiku) that reveals, in a mental flash, the truth of Zen — and the form, brief and empty, of the haiku. And the same goes for looking at photographs.
Barthes goes on to explain that Zen (and haiku) is articulated around a metaphysics without subject and without god, the awakening to the Buddhist mu (in Japanese, emptiness), to the Zen satori, which is an “awakening to the fact”, an apprehension of the thing as event, the frog leaping (not as a substance) to the innateness of what happens: it is there, it is now, it is all related in the emptiness. That’s as briefly as I can explain the art speak that I wrote above.
All this resonates with my feeling that the visual impulse, the configuration of form — light and shadow — seen directly by the eye, is what drives me to photograph, removed entirely from words. One can formulate various types of reasons for photographing: recording, documenting, memorializing, expressing, communicating, and so on. Ultimately, for me, the most basic one is this visual impulse — specifically, when I see a configuration of light and shadow (or color) that appears as a form that attracts me. That’s when I’m driven to take a picture. And this visual image, its feeling, is what I remember, visually, years afterwards. Looking today at the images I like the best, I remember the feeling I had when I originally pressed the shutter.
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