When you meet Narcissus along the road,
shoot him. Use good film when you do.
I'm an analog sort of fellow
myself. That is to say, I like to make pit-fired pottery, the
original way to get things done. My favorite method of making an
image is to do woodcut printmaking. I like to shoot photographs with
film in the camera. Never mind the thousands of hours I've spent
generating fractals on the computer or an equal amount of time spend
digitally editing photographs and videos. I would rather listen to
all my old vinyl albums on a turntable than use ear-buds and listen
to digitally compressed music off my cell phone. Right now I have
mp3's loaded on my I-phone. I don't have access to any lp's or a
turntable.
So I'm a list of contradictions. Now
that that is out of the way, there's a greater question riding the
airwaves of various conversations regarding the value of photograph
in modern day society. I'm currently reading a book about Eadweard
Muybridge. I started it in 2009 after I bought it used at the library
for fifty cents. I haven't even got to the part where he takes a
“selfie” of himself and a couple of indigenous tribesmen in
California before they (the Indians) were all wiped out in the
“Indian wars”. So that's how informed I am on the topic. I've
read a couple of books on film making as well, just to impress you
with my lengthy knowledge about photographic film and film making.
They were both books about film making before the twentieth century.
It might have started with the work of Muybridge but like I said, I
haven't gotten that far yet. So this is where we start.
Thanks to digital photography and the
cell phone, I've seen more photographs of people on Face Book with
them holding up the phone in the mirror of the bathroom (or public
restroom) with the commode in the background in the past few years
than anyone in history has seen before “social networking web
sites” and digital photograph happened. Face Book is currently
hosting the largest archive of digital photographs in the world. One
gets a sense of this all being disposable reality. At least these are
selfies with the commode in the background and not with indigenous
people who are in the way of progress. This is the age of disposable
reality, but one does hope they flushed first, then took the
photograph of themselves.
Somewhere in between archeological digs
of old village sites with pottery that was pit-fired and digital
photographs of earth from satellites in space, there was a moment in
time when there was concerned about creating work that would be
available for future generations. Never mind that pottery has proven
to be the most archival work that humans have created so far. Smoke
soot and clay on cave walls comes in a close second. There is actual
information that needs to be preserved for usage in the future. How
to get that information to last that long and be in a physical form
that can be accessed is a good question. One could look at what has
lasted the longest already and see if that is a good model to work
from.
I don't think that Narcissus was that
much of a freak in human history. There is some merit to the idea of
self-awareness, self-esteem, and self-consciousness. Dancers watch
themselves in the mirror a lot. That is how they improve with their
form. Spiritual growth happens through looking within.
Self-replication is a form of species survival. (Okay, I just like
that line so never mind.) When we follow history from what is known
to be preserved from pottery and cave paintings on down through stone
sculptures and oil paintings on treated canvas on forward to
photography with film and the digital kind, there isn't a lot of hope
for the modern technology in the archival situation. Photographic
prints don't last very long. What good is it for Narcissus to take a
selfie and then outlive it?
That conversation comes up a lot when
discussing art and photography. This is a disposable society that
treats everything like cigarette lighters; use them up and toss them.
While there is a degree of appreciation for the lack of attachment to
the fleeting digital reality that keeps sweeping over us on a daily
basis, there is a lack of integrity in the greater scheme of things.
So of this information might be relevant beyond the individual
seeking instant gratification. I mean, don't let me throw a wet rag
on the party here but some of this attitude is borne out of a
response to the nuclear age where the push of a single button could
reduce a good deal of the human population to radioactive dust in the
blink of an eye. If that possibility became a reality then there
isn't much reason to invest a lot of energy into creating anything
that is going to be here 20,000 years. The pyramids in Egypt would be
a lump of glass in the post-nuclear age.
Others have a different response to the
importance of time. This is, after all, a conversation about time.
That's what brought Eadweard Muybridge into the conversation to
start with. He made important advancements in the camera in order to
capture images on glass plates. He created ways to capture multiple
images of the same subject to show motion over a period of time.
Others took the idea and created cameras that could do the same thing
through a single camera and invented film making. Narcissus didn't
survive his own obsession of his reflection in the water. The rest of
us may not either.
I watched several video documentaries
about the preservation of photographs and digital art today and that
prompted me to rejoin the conversation with others with this short
essay. On some levels the technology of being able to create an image
is advancing faster than the ability to produce that image in an
archival manner. Even the crisis of the hour that occurred when the
Star Wars movies were being released several decades after they were
produced brought the issue to light. The film they were dedicated to
and distributed was not very archival and the producers never
bothered to have them preserved onto an archival film. There was just
enough footage of the first movie from all the films in storage to
recreate the first film. Another year in storage and the film would
have been lost to time.
A lot of work has been produced and
left to face time alone in boxes in storage on very fragile media.
How important this work is remains in question. If left to Narcissus,
it is all valuable. In a world where half a billion photographs are
being uploaded to Face Book daily, Narcissus wins the argument as
long as there are funds to keep investing in more digital storage
facilities and programmers to keep up with the databases. In the
video, The Invisible Photograph: Part 1 (Underground), one
commentator states that we can participate in this process for free.
That isn't an accurate statement, but compared to the expense of
buying a film camera, film, developing the film and making prints
from the film, this does look like a free medium now. I can take a
photograph with my I-phone and post the file to Face Book and have it
seen globally to an audience of thousands in a few minutes. For
someone who made a living by taking photographs on film in remote
areas of the world, hoping the film would survive the trip back to
the darkroom and a print onto a magazine editor's desk, and finally
to print, this ability to produce and distribute work is
mind-boggling. To have a show of photographs in a gallery forty or
fifty years ago and compare that to what is being done today blows
the mind.
I like these videos. It just gives me
a little hope, after all.
Oliver Loveday © May 20, 2014, 11:30
pm EDT
More about the work of Oliver Loveday can be found at Loveday Studio.
