Phenomenology Friday June 10, 2005
One of the first art photo books I ever surveyed was a work featuring Andre Kertesz, in my local library when I was a teenager. He was a contemporary of Henri Cartier-Bresson, but has a significantly lesser reputation. But some of his photos are the equal of Cartier-Bresson; I particularly enjoyed scenes of snow-covered parks and streets, which were my introduction to the stark, graphic beauty that can be achieved with photography.
There’s a section in Andre Kertesz: His Life And Work (Borhan 2000), which says:
Refusing to use the effect of shock, making use of an aesthetic of sobriety, Kertesz thus invented what one could call, if one remembered the objective assigned to Husserl’s philosophy, a photographic ‘phenomenology’. To return to the things themselves’, to unburden the philosophy of false problems and pseudo-concepts – such was the Husserlian imperative; to make visible, to show, without a visual a priori, to describe in a word, such was the Kerteszian photographic imperative. Kertesz’s attentive and modest gaze, while seeking to capture ‘the right moment’, rejected the effect of the punctum (the term used by Barthes in his Camera Lucida) so overwhelmingly present in most of the photo-essays of the time as well as in the dramatic composition deployed in the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. In Kertesz, there was neither dramatisation of the fact nor monumentalisation of memory, but rather something more tenuous, more fragile, to which one voluntarily gives trivial names: the things (not the objects), the people (not men). (89-90).
That’s a very suggestive and succinct piece of text, that resonates with the subtle, non-intellectual process that underlies my own photography; the ‘aesthetic’ or the ‘objective’ or the ‘photographic feeling’ for which my photos are an expression. Basically, it’s the kind of description I would use to summarise my own interests. Not to get pretentious or over-complicated about it, but just to say that I’m interested in simplicity rather than complexity, not shock but quiet, suggestive, and haiku-like moments, all conceived within the real, living situation and not in relation to a grand, theoretical methodology.
I encountered Husserl and his ideas about phenomenology while at university, and he was one of those intriguing references you want to pursue at a later date. I never did read him directly, but have a general understanding of his ideas and some of my university studies were related, albeit that they didn’t concern Husserl himself. Thus I studied Dilthey, hermeneutics and existentialism: subjects I found quite difficult when I was 19 or 20, although now I would simply refer to the general basis of phenomenology, as the pursuit and validation of some kind of essence, and not worry too much about the protracted and detailed works that Husserl wrote. That is, I refer to the phenomenological attitude, or objective, as a profound philosophical stance that antidotes some of the castle-building nonsense that you frequently see in philosophy and academia.
Here’s a summary of some of the ideas of phenomenology:
1. Phenomenologists tend to oppose the acceptance of unobservable matters and grand systems erected in speculative thinking.
2. Phenomenologists tend to oppose naturalism (also called objectivism and positivism), which is the worldview growing from modern natural science and technology that has been spreading from Northern Europe since the Renaissance.
3. Phenomenologists tend to justify cognition (and also evaluation and action) with reference to what Edmund Husserl called Evidenz, which is awareness of a matter itself as disclosed in the most clear, distinct, and adequate way for something of its kind.
4. Phenomenologists tend to believe that not only objects in the natural and cultural worlds, but also ideal objects, such as numbers, and even conscious life itself can be made evident and thus known.
5. Phenomenologists tend to hold that inquiry ought to focus upon what might be called “encountering” as it is directed at objects and, correlatively, upon “objects as they are encountered”.
6. Phenomenologists tend to recognise the role of description in universal, a priori, or “eidetic” terms as prior to explanation by means of causes, purposes, or grounds.
I would summarise and simplify all of that by saying that the phenomenological position is grounded in actual experience, and uses that as the beginning and end of its philosophical methodology. It is the perfect ‘cut the crap’ system of ideas and I find the photographic impulse and the photographic feeling, appreciating snapshot moments of poignant transitory time, have poetic and phenomenological resonance.