Time Thursday July 21, 2005
One of the most joyful aspects of photography is the way it captures moments of time in a shutter-snapping instant. No hours or days of labour with brush and paints, no prolonged struggle with rock, wood and chisel. Photographic art is liberating, an exercise of the mind in relation to a transitory environment because the spirit and hand is freed from material tasks. You can thus focus on perception itself, as a mental phenomena. To perceive is not only to look, but also to imagine, project, desire and remember. And instead of worrying about infinite possibilities of tone, colour and composition on a canvas, for much of the time you are restricted to contingent circumstance. Focal lengths and camera angles do produce dramatically different shots, making entirely different pictures. But except with darkroom or Photoshop editing, you can’t create a mountain if it’s not there. The entire content, composition, image is there in front of you at that moment.
In some kinds of practice, the photographic moment can be a second or even less. Mountain photography is comparatively leisurely, giving you plenty of time to wander around exploring viewpoints, changing focal length and the play of light and shadow. But it’s not uncommon to be pressured by changing conditions, knowing you only have a few minutes before that illuminated rock will be dark, that shadowy texture will be bleached out by bright sun. And in adverse situations like extreme cold or a vicious wind, you can only endure a few minutes of work before you have to resume your walking, simply to keep warm. Fast, automated cameras are usually regarded as especially useful to sports photographers, but there are times when they are also essential for mountain work.
I remember the thrill of my first camera and my first pictures, and much of the fun came from the power it gave you. I began to have a clear sense of passing time in my teens – school years came and went, and I had experiences and made decisions I’d seen my elder sisters do before me. My camera gave me a new relationship to this passing flow; I could stop it, record it, have a permanent record whenever I wanted. It was an extension of my visual-psychological capacities, giving me a new power of observation and interpretation. And as I looked at the pictures returned from the lab, they were curiously ambivalent. Real but not real; giving me an alternative, mediated vantage point on life.
Many years later I am interested in photographic philosophy, in the same way that theorist Gilles Deleuze developed his philosophy in relation to cinema. He derived some of his ideas from Henri Bergson who spoke for example about the “image”, in a philosophical and psychological way. Visual perception is entwined with psychology and a photograph is a means of philosophical reflection, a vortex between the living and actual and the non-living and relative. It is an abstraction of the situation which precedes and follows it, a temporary arrest offering a reference point we do not normally or otherwise have. Roland Barthes’ book Camera Lucida focuses on pictures of loved and deceased people, making poignant the discrepancy between photographic representation and fact. Mountain photography is based on a different relationship to time where the represented scene is not a snapped moment, but which endures for hundreds if not thousands of years. In that respect it is a meditation on passing geological time and physical endurance. These are not new or especially interesting ideas, but what does interest me is how this fits into a wider photographic philosophy.
Any photograph is a fictional reconfiguration of experience; we left behind the old ‘photograph doesn’t lie’ ideas many decades ago as we understood how images can be powerfully contrived. In the media last year, there was a lot of fuss made over artist David Hockney saying photography was redundant and boring because the increasingly digital practice was manipulated: articles in the Guardian, on the BBC web site, and a BBC TV programme. Nonsense – while digital methods greatly increase this potential, photography has never been pure and reliable. News or documentary images provide good examples of bias and selective emphasis, but even a formal portrait is commonly understood as an interpretation. Famous work from people like David Bailey make this process obvious: how he used lighting, background and selective, sometimes dramatic and unconventional cropping to create a particular effect, in accordance with his personal understanding of the subject. Less widely appreciated, perhaps, is how mountain photography is also selective. You cannot alter the environment, but have to recognise your powerlessness. The light, contours and shadows are defined, and you cannot change them. And yet considerable editing goes into these pictures, where you are confronted with an overwhelming 360 degree panorama, from which you take a relatively small scenic slice. The panorama may be exhilarating and formidable, but it’s not necessarily aesthetic, in photographic terms. Unless you are taking a panoramic shot, you will edit out 80% of that environment making a beautiful picture but one which does not represent the entire visual and kinaesthetic experience of standing in that spot. In one respect, a mountain landscape is always diminished in a photographic representation; in another respect it is made more aesthetic and thus improved.
My mountain photography is an attempt to appropriate nature and I know that paradoxically, I can never achieve that. As much as I succeed in discovering an effective composition from a 360 degree impression, I have to also ‘forget’ myself. In the same way I have to ‘respect’ the mountains, i.e. not attempt to impose my plans and my will on them, so I have to understand that my photography is a foreground detail against an immense background context. According to Bergson, there are two modes of relating to an event. It can be temporal, where you are embedded within the event. And it can be spatial, which spans the entire length of the event. Photography provides an alternative and spatial relationship where we would normally be embedded. In that respect it is a unique philosophical practice and while ultimately this kind of philosophy does not alter or improve one’s photography (or make it more impressive to a potential audience), it is a valid process in itself. “For now we see through a glass, darkly” it says in Corinthians 13, implying that our perceptions are muddied. Childhood perception is referred to as a comparison, where we gaze at life with a purity and innocence we never fully recover. It’s a common theme in the Romantic writers, inverting the assumption that the adult has greater wisdom. “The child”, as Gerard Manley Hopkins said, “is father to the man”. The simplicity of a haiku is arguably more sophisticated than the most learned and complex work – The Wasteland, say, by TS Eliot – because it points you towards your self rather than external cultural knowledge, towards intuitive and more encompassing perception rather than detailed intellectual mentation which cannot see the overall pattern. Less is more.
The I Ching, the haiku and the photographic image capture a temporal moment, implying that at another and more subtle level there lies all the explanation and meaning you need. As with the I Ching, a photo is a snapshot in a philosophical tapestry where audience perception has to ‘fill’ the apparent emptiness, as with the small, typically haiku inconsequence of a frog jumping into a pond. A photograph investigates the present moment, i.e. tries to look at the ‘grain of sand’ in a fresh and vital manner in a non-habitual way, taking nothing for granted.