A Thousand Words

I took this picture on the evening of Friday, February 26, 2010. I had temped at the investment management firm where I worked sporadically in the period between December 2009 and mid-March 2010, when, after months of fruitless searching, I found leave-replacement work as an English teacher at a school for high school dropouts in Red Hook. As of the taking of this picture, I had no idea I’d find such a position; I’d been looking for months and, as the school year wound into its final stretch (spring), the situation had come to look hopeless.

It had been a mixed day, weather-wise: in the morning it had snowed heavily, then it had rained, then for lunch the snow returned. By 5:48, when I took the picture, it had been raining steadily for a while; the melted snow was collecting in slushy lakes at the street corners.

I had gotten off work at five and, with some time to kill before meeting some friends at a bar on 22^nd St., decided to take some pictures of the city with the snow melting. Picture-taking—I don’t feel comfortable calling it photography—was a hobby I’d picked up the previous summer, around the time I finished my last paper for graduate school. I was suffering from writer’s block and needed something creative to fill my time. Taking pictures was something.

2. 

I’ve dabbled in photography ever since high school, where I took a class in it. In the late 1990s, my then-girlfriend converted her bathroom into darkroom and tried to develop some of the pictures we’d taken around Berlin, where she was living. In 2004, I bought my first digital camera. That made everything easier because you could see the pictures you’d taken and, if they sucked, figure out why and try again. Also, there was the matter of space: anyone with a decent memory card could take dozens, if not hundreds, of pictures; that meant you could afford to take and retake multiple pictures of the same thing and, thus, increase the probability of a good shot.

3. 

The difference between analog and digital photography is drawn into sharp relief by a comparison between the pictures taken via each respective medium. Those I took with a disposable camera on a trip to Lincoln, Nebraska in October 2003 are objectively bad: little in the way of composition is evident; neither my friend Dave, whom I was visiting, nor I look good; and many of the pictures are too dark or too blurry to be worth anything. I’m sure the quality of the camera I was using was a factor, but it’s obvious I was just snapping away without thinking about it. The pictures from a July 2004 trip to Lincoln, taken just after the purchase of my first Cannon Digital ELPH camera, are, while still not good, markedly better: Dave and I look way better; there is an attempt at composition; whereas the analog shots appeared half-assed, these are deliberate and considered (the inevitable duds notwithstanding).

4. 

Which begs the question: Is there a line between picture taking and photography—or, for that matter, between the product of casual, off-hand creativity and “art”? If there is, it can’t be in the finished product itself, as, in many cases, the work of artists/photographers is often indistinguishable from the work of people who just happened to pick up a paintbrush or snap a picture. Similarly, we can’t really say that the difference between what is and isn’t art is determined by the audience, as it’s possible to list countless examples of creative work (Mission Man’s discography, Barnett Newman’s paintings, Steve Keene’s stuff, etc.) that have been deemed “art” by one person and, for lack of a better term, “not art” by another. Also, what about creative work that has never seen an audience? Would it not be art?

If we’re going to draw a line between art and not art, then, it seems safest to focus on the artist him- or herself and, specifically, on intent/volition, i.e. the decision, conscious or otherwise, on the part of a person to produce or create something. This is in harmony with Webster’s definition of “art”: “the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects” / “works so produced.” Even this definition isn’t perfect, though, because what do we call creative work produced without consciousness or intent? Do snapshots taken without the “conscious use of skill and creative imagination” qualify as art? Can a coffee stain be art? Maybe a proviso should be added: works so produced and works resembling those so produced. Or: works so produced and those in which the conscious use of skill and creative imagination can be inferred. Or something like that.

5.

I like the Webster’s definition of art, even with its imperfections, both because it’s democratic and because it means that, as someone who consciously uses skill (limited, yes, but nevertheless) and creative imagination in the production of aesthetic objects (i.e. photographs), I’m an artist/photographer. 

Not that I needed the definition to continue taking pictures—I was going to do that anyway. But it makes you feel better about yourself as, say, a thirty-two year old man killing time between getting off work at your temp job and going to drink at a bar by walking around Manhattan in the rain taking pictures of places, things, and especially people, to think of yourself not as a bored, delusional loser with a camera, but as a photographer. Even in retrospect—looking back on that night—it feels good to think of myself that way.