The Art of the Repetition of Art
About a year ago, my friend Dave the photographer told me to stop shooting Maine waterfronts because I was repeating myself.
He was right.
But every once in a while, I sneak back anyway and try a new tack—if only because waterfront wharves, boats and gear are ubiquitous around here and seem so detail-y and intriguing to me that I’m just sure they’d make naturally good, potentially ever-fresh fodder for photos.
(I’m also impressed by people like Josef Sudek, who spent his entire career shooting scenes in Prague, many of them of the tiny walled garden outside his window. Think of the vitality of a mind like his, keeping such an apparently small repertoire of possibilities fresh!)
The photo you see here shows the stern of a working boat, so closely framed that it looks like an abstract composition—without being, in the end, entirely inscrutable after all.
Is this repetition? Maybe so. I’ve certainly taken lots of abstracts along the Maine waterfront.
John Szarkowski, in a famous catalog essay introducing William Eggleston’s photos at a MOMA exhibition in 1976, warned tartly against images such as “prows of sailboats reflected in rippled water” that can be “recognized by their resemblance to…Abstract Expressionist paintings” and whose “unhappy fate [it is] to remind us of something similar but better.” Wow.
I love John, and I love reading so many intelligent, incisive words on photography strung together in one place. I reread his essay regularly.
But somehow at the end of the day, I disagree with him on this point, at least in part (especially when I recall he was talking about photos that are distinctly not good)—and adhere with upthrust chin to the belief that my photo isn’t one of these.
I think the underlying reason people enjoy and “get” abstract paintings is that the world we live in has presented us—quietly and spontaneously since time immemorial—with a rich tapestry of visual experiences that can be perceived as abstractions. We see this way all the time, between moments of more conventional perception, even if we don’t often stop to think about it consciously.
I’m looking across my office right now, for example, at a cluster of colored-glass vases and houseplants in the front parlor, shimmering in a breeze and back-lit by a golden autumn sundown. No doubt you can see this scene in your mind’s eye both in the conceptual way I just described it—i.e., as being made of conventionally real objects delimited by names—and as a wordless composition of beautifully arrayed abstract shapes, colors, energies and movements.
To me, this reflects the fact that our native visual experience of the world (i.e., things the camera sees, too) came first. Abstract Expressionist painters did not discover something new that they were uniquely qualified to portray better than anyone else. And the camera was not a johnny-come-lately. On the contrary, as many observers have noted, the arrival on the scene of photography in the mid-19th century ushered in new ways of seeing that profoundly influenced painting.
And so forth.
Whether my particular photo is any good, chin upthrust or otherwise, is an open question. Place your bets. But as for me, I’m going back to the waterfront at first light.
[Above: Working boat (detail) along the wharves at Portland, Maine.]
Cathy:
Welcome back to blogging!
I like your cheerful defense of the waterfront as subject matter and the gentle rebuke that Szarkowski deserves for limiting his vision of abstract expressionism to painters.
But why didn’t you take issue with the notion (implicit in your friend Dave’s comment, it seems to me) that repeating oneself is bad? That it’s not what *real* artists do?
I would argue heartily for repetition. Not the rote of flashcards but a process, a ritual even, that cultivates quiet absorption, an alert eye, an open spirit. Surely repetition of that sort is valuable, perhaps as an end in itself and certainly as a means of mastering one’s craft, getting in the right frame of mind (no pun intended) for one’s work, understanding one’s sources of inspiration, encouraging the “unselfing” (a word I picked up from Iris Murdoch) that may well be a prerequisite to making art.
I would also argue for yet more photographs of the waterfront (or other sources of abstract imagery)! It’s my guess that returning, as you do, to a certain kind of image may be a sure way for you to open yourself to beauty. It’s been said (by Elaine Scarry, I think) that beautiful things have been placed here and there throughout the world to serve as small wake-up calls to perception … that beautiful things always carry greetings from other worlds within them … and that their gift to the perceiver is a more capacious regard for the world.
High on the list for a contemplative photographer, no?
25 September 2008, 8:45 amMary:
Cathy, is the Elaine Scarry quote from On Beauty and Being Just? Would you recommend other books by Scarry?
25 September 2008, 11:48 amCathy:
Yes, that’s the one. “Dreaming by the Book,” about literary arts, the work of the writer and the work of the reader, is compelling, too. Wendy Lesser, an essayist I like, said in a review of “Dreaming” that “reading this book is a bit like drinking 10 cups of very strong coffee. It activates the brain, induces a frenzy of querulousness and makes one want to scribble in red ink up and down the margins.”
25 September 2008, 6:55 pm