I read this book because someone I follow
on Flickr wrote a review about the book when it first came out in response to
some comments Elkin made about images on Flickr, which are, it has to be said a
little more than condemnatory. The
writer of the article felt the comments were elitist, based in ignorance and displayed
a total failure to look beyond the ‘kitschy and tedious images[1]’
that Elkin bemoans. Having not read the
book I felt myself jumping on the Flickr guy’s bandwagon of rage aimed at Elkin,
and without thinking joined his Flickr group – “Bollocks to James Elkins”. After thinking about it later I realized I’d
reactively joined his group before bothering to make up my own mind, based on the accusation of elitism which I too
find difficult to stomach.
So I downloaded What Photography Is. I’ll
respond to the Flickr criticism later and probably rather briefly as that is
hardly the point of the book, and within the context of the whole is a little insignificant,
or at any rate only a tiny part of something else that is going on. At any rate it’s not worth getting upset
about. In all honesty, what he says is
undoubtedly true, but there are so many other factors to consider that it
becomes only a slither of the truth -
anyhow, more later.
The book is written as a response to Roland
Barthes’ Camera Lucida. I had no idea about this as I downloaded
it and was pleased once I realised having just read that other difficult and at
times impenetrable book. I discuss that here in an earlier blog. (Another
serendipitous moment on my little TAOP amble.)
However, a phrase Andrew (tutor) used – ‘basking in the glory of
Barthes’ did keep popping into my head and I so tried to remain cautious as I
read.
Elkin describes his book as speaking
directly to Camera Lucida, and I do hope
that reading it has given me a deeper understanding of the older one. Crucially for me, in relation to Barthes, the
notion of photography being about death, being literally a picture of death into
which we stare every time we look at a photograph – ‘the feeling of that-has-been, it-has-taken-place,
they-were-there, he-stood-there, he-is-going-to-die are sunk at the bottom
of photography’[2] is
questioned and rejected by later academics and certainly not considered the be
all and end of all of photographic philosophy. Readers like me who are
still finding their way with this theory stuff tend to believe everything we
read. Elkin continues, “all the writing
toward death can be understood, I think, as a brilliant self-deception, in a
way of avoiding thinking about what photography ‘itself’ continues to show us.”[3] Elkin very clearly shows us by the end of the
book what he thinks photography is, although perhaps you could and should
replace the word ‘photography’ for ‘life’.
Elkin looks at Barthes’ ‘punctum’.
‘…what might be worse than the possibility
that photographs “prick” us, that they harbour an “optical unconscious,” that they point uncomfortably at the viewers
own death?
In a word:
that they might be boring. Or apparently meaningless.”[4]
There are several references in the book
that suggest that much of photography, including fine art photography might after all be dull, disappointing and
uninteresting. He suggests that actually
all we see in a photograph is that life is intrinsically dull and uninteresting
and no matter how much we wish to imbue photography with something interesting
about ourselves we are left with this sense that that is not the case.[5]
What’s most important for me here is not that I can't help wondering if Elkin in rather fearful he might be boring, but that by
reading What Photography Is and being made to think and question Barthes’ work I am reminded
to question Elkin's work.
As I hinted earlier I’m not actually sure
that this book is about photography at all, and neither is Elkin. “So how can this book be about photography in
general? Perhaps in the end it isn’t.” [6] Just as Camera
Lucida is about so much more than photography. And this little review too has references to
parts of my life that have nothing to do with the book or photography.
Elkin starts by examining a photograph of a
selenite window – a pre-glass window that is difficult to see through, then ice
and then salt – ‘Through a selenite window, a sharp bright day will appear
fractured and broken; in lake ice, everything beyond the surface sinks into
night; in rock salt, the photography is just a reminder that something cannot
be seen’[7].
Then he examines in quite some detail
photographs of rocks as well as some re-photography (photos taken of exact
places from the same position after a long period of time – 100 years for
instance). Following that he looks at microscopic
photographs of amoebas that he has taken himself with his own equipment. Then he looks at photographs of the atom bomb
being tested – not the famous iconographic mushroom image, but ones taken seconds
earlier as the bomb starts its explosion.
Finally, and most distressing of all by a very long way, he looks at
photographs of extreme physical torture – images of a man being sliced up alive
in a brutal and chilling execution surrounded by complicit spectators and of
course a photographer who documents the execution with a significant number of
frames. I must stress that I could not
look at these photographs and swiped through them as fast as possible. The tiny glimpses I had were more than enough,
in fact too much; but it meant not reading his words either for those pages in
which he describes in minute detail what is occurring in the images. If he says anything else I missed it. I kept wondering why there was no facility to
avoid the photos altogether especially considering the fact that I was reading on
a Kindle. However, I am aware that I
could have made the choice to stop reading at any point before the photos
appeared. Saying that, I don’t think I
actually believed he was going to include them when reading the preamble before
the images began to appear. But then
that’s admitting I hadn’t quite got the measure of Elkin up to that point
despite all the signals – you live and
you learn but very, very slowly, the saying should be.
For me this obsession with the horrors of
existence is all about Elkin and his relationship with the world. All about his particular pathology, which he
freely admits.[8] And now as I write I continue to wonder how
this ties in with photography. Except of
course I have come away with an extremely clear understanding
that photography can be a shockingly powerful medium and in many ways
potentially more powerful than painting or drawing for instance in showing us
extremely detailed aspects of what it is to be.
You don’t begin to get any idea of the
horror of the torture inflicted on people when looking at drawings, prints and
paintings of people being hanged, drawn and quartered in the same way you do when seeing the
images of ‘death by a thousand cuts’ at the end of What Photography Is. If I
think of Heironymus Bosch’s work, which explores the gruesome side of humanity
so grotesquely I also see that those paintings are nevertheless appealing
to us in some way. Bosch’s vision which
is nightmarish in the extreme is also exhilarating, mysterious and beautiful (although perhaps not to his contemporaries, I don’t know about that). The photographs at the end of Elkins book are
so awful and horrific that it’s difficult to find any reason for them to
continue to exist except that they must as a testament to how very low human
beings are capable of sinking. What is
even more horrifying is that there were a group of French collectors of this
material and this fascination for extreme violence amongst humans is difficult
to contemplate - although tales of Internet voyeurism into sadistic horror spring to mind, not to mention the reported high number of views the recent spate of beheadings by ISIS have had, so of course it continues.
By focusing on the collection of
photographs prior to the final set – all without people and scenes, Elkin strips
away the ‘ecstasy, the sublime, the punctum, memory, history, race, gender,
identity, death, nostalgia[9]’
as much as he can to get to the bottom of what photography is – if indeed that
is what he is exploring here. The ‘perverse’
(his word) finale leads us to his notion of the core of something – either
photography or what it is to be human.
Or both.
For James Elkin, photography’s most precious
use is not about families or prettiness or cleverness or ‘kitsch’ – a word or
derivatives thereof he uses throughout the book in relation to a wide variety
of work. It is about its power to show
us reality – although he claims we do not see that reality – ‘the photograph
itself is scarcely being seen’.[10]
We avoid seeing it, choosing instead
to see what we want to see. Unless, I
guess the point is, the subject is so extreme as in the case of the execution
that we cannot help but see it – and I literally avoided seeing those by
sweeping right past them as fast as I could. The fact that he was able to sit and study them, despite his reported feelings of revulsion is something to think about very carefully - how much does it take to make James Elkins feel alive? Photography, like the selenite window, the ancient lake ice and salt also obscures what there is to be seen, says Elkin. We have
chosen to obscure it? As prolific users of that medium who frame, expose, and realise photography in a certain way. Perhaps.
In this book, through structure and plot;
through his obsessive studies of rocks which evoke the deafening sound of
eternity stretching out either side of the 100 or so years between photograph
and re-photograph; to the molecular violence and lack of humanity, monstrous
beings that devour one another as only a selfish gene can; to the nightmarish
and detailed pictures of explosions that are devastatingly destructive and
‘godlike’; and ending with the horrific images of torture that are so upsetting
and removed from the life we in West like to think we live now, Elkin describes
his view of photography, of existence,
of life. He shows us a brutal and
violent nightmarish Darwinian struggle and he uses the excuse of photography to
do so.
The whole time I was reading What Photography Is I had to hold in mind that I have an unhealthy habit of being
drawn in by such provocative types, a type I recognised very early on despite
my previous statement that I hadn’t quite got the measure of him (I’m so
predictable to myself), and Elkin’s book is a gargantuan ‘intellectually
superior’ provocation from start to finish.
That is why it is pointless to become riled by his dismissal of Flickr
or fine art or Sally Mann or Andreas Gursky or Thomas Ruff or any of the other
big names he brazenly sweeps aside, along with every ‘people’ orientated
photograph ever taken, never forget. That part of his essay is an affectation, although one that in the end does serve a purpose. This sort of intellectually
superior thought process can and often does come from a place of extreme cleverness
– but you are made to work rather hard to sift through the verbal dexterity to
try and get to grips with what is actually being said. It also comes
from a place of deep and searing pain.
And it’s that pain that we see discussed again and again and again
throughout the book. Life is searing and
painful, life is horrific, life is about being devoured and/or destroyed or
about devouring, and destroying.
I’m glad I read the book. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone due to the
shocking images at the end and I wouldn’t want to be responsible for imposing
those or other aspects of the book on another person. I’m not sure
it is necessary to read it to get to the bottom of what photography is because
I don’t believe it is possible to do so.
And there must be plenty of less painful and terrible books to read (I
don’t mean the book is terrible – I mean the pain within it). Photography is many different things to a
wide variety of people and situations.
It’s a fascinating invention, developed at a fascinating time and what
we humans are doing with it now, frantically, obsessively, inanely and gratuitously
photographing every moment of our lives and sharing it across the Internet is
extraordinary. It’s almost as if we’ve
been programmed to record all aspects of life on earth for prosperity before it
all comes to an end
Ultimately I don’t think I can say Bollocks
to James Elkin, although there is still a part of me that wants to. The art world and especially the New York art
world are notoriously elitist. He is
part of it and yet has pilloried much of it in his book in order to get to the bottom of
something, life or photography, his own sense of what existence is, whichever you will, and that takes a certain degree
of chutzpah, arrogance and dare I say it, a degree of narcissism.
Whatever - I can’t help feeling
that it is worth trying to work through or work out some of what he is saying –
difficult as that may be.
All references taken from What Photography Is, James Elkin, Kindle Edition, Routledge, First published 2011
[1] 77% Loc 2240
[2] 95% Loc 2771
[3] 96% Loc 2779
[4] 97% Loc 2829
[5] 97% Loc 2830
[6] 94% Loc 2726
[7] 21% Loc 591
[8] 94% Loc 2723
[9] 48% Loc 1369
[10] 94% Loc 2739
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