Vibrations of the Invisible

It may seem strange, but I just have this strong conviction that children might be able to see certain things in the presence of certain things. Things that adults are no longer aware of. Children have a way of listening to "muses," they're aware of them, because they haven't been educated out of it. They haven't closed their minds to that possibility. And I feel that if the photographer is very sensitive, he can do this too. He can hear the vibrations of the invisible.
—Arthur Tress, in The Dream Collector

I am going through back pages of my travel journal, and finding passages like this in my own handwriting. I agree with Tress, that if the photographer is very sensitive, he or she can see more than what's there to the eye. I once concluded a poem, titled last words, with the lines:

like a path among trees
your turning affected you more
than any god or planet,
as though you breathed
only the air you could see
with flesh eyes.

There are lots of things we life we can't see, which we take on faith until we take them for granted. When was the last time you thought about what you were breathing? (Assuming you're not subject to an illness such asthma which keeps you aware of your breathing at all times.) I get accused of being good at pointing out the obvious at times; but it seems to me that most people ignore the obvious, and the occasional reminder is no bad thing.


The Illuminated Man, by Duane Michals

This photo is one of the first I'd encountered by Duane Michals, back when I first saw it, many years ago, and it remains one of my favorites from his body of work. I have carried it around as a postcard, tacked on a bookshelf or bulletin board or refrigerator, where I could see it, ever since. Actually, I've worn out a couple of copies of the postcard, and had to replace them. I can explain this photo technically, now that I'm a photographer, but what remains powerful about the image is that the man seems to be turning into light. Light is exploding out of him from within. He is catching on pure white fire. He catches light, and becomes light.

This is the sort of thing Tress means, and which both Tress and Michals have recorded in their photos, about how someone who remains sensitive to their surroundings can see things others do not. John Minahan wrote, in 1972, in his Introduction to The Dream Collector:

A number of critics have suggested that the obvious success of Tress' dream photographs must be due in large measure to an extraordinary rapport with children, and this is quite true. Watching him work, you're aware of an elusive "chemistry" going on, extremely difficult to define. Of course, part of it is due to his casual appearance and mannerisms, but this is merely a surface psychology that photographers have used for many years. It goes much deeper than that. I think the key to Tress' unusual harmony with children is that he is "childlike" himself, in the true sense of the word. That is, his imagination is still essentially unsophisticated—and therefore genuinely creative. Like children, he hasn't yet lost the capacity to wonder, to see the invisible, to dream in the daytime. He hasn't yet drawn an indelible line between illusion and reality. I believe children intuitively sense this about him.

Child-like rather than childish. That seems important to understand. It's not an infantile and needy response to life, but a playful one, that leaves open the doors to possibility.

There is an openness to spiritual masters that is similarly child-like, in its spontaneity and sensitivity. I think of the story of an important official who sought out a famous Zen monk in Medieval Japan, and was stunned to discover that, rather than sitting meditating in his hermitage, the monk was playing hide-and-seek with the village children. Similarly, Tress' method was to record the children telling him their dreams into a tape recorder, then play them back to the kids to hear, after which they reenacted the dream together for the camera.

This openness to wonder, to the invisible, is something artists and spiritual masters and children all have in common. It might be wise for those among us who have become so hardcore adult that we can no longer play, to regain some of this, this creative play. I know far too many writers and artists who have become paralyzed because they no longer allow themselves to take risks, in order to avoid making presumed mistakes. They have become perhaps too sophisticated. (One sees this attitude a lot more in Big City writers than anywhere else.) They get very stuck, and their faces literally age from all the worry lines, because they don't let themselves risk failure, an d they're afraid of appearing foolish.

But here's another lesson from children: if you fail, you do it again till you get it right. That's how toddlers learn to walk: by falling down a lot. That's also how older kids learn other new skills: by practice, and by play. I often think that the real problem with a lot of contemporary poetry is that it's become too hardcore adult, takes itself way too seriously, and has a lot of its sense of play. Play is also exploration, pathfinding and waymaking new trails into the invisible lands, invisible not because they don't exist but because they haven't been seen before.

Children let their failures go. They don't cling to them, unless and until some adult beats a sense of personal failure into them. Children recover quickly from mistakes: it's all learning. It's adults who beat themselves up forever for a mistake they made a subjective eternity ago. It's adults who can't let go.

Adults are driven by the invisible, the intangible, even those who claim to be total pragmatists and materialists. Because, you see, pragmatism is an idea, a concept. The illuminated man burns away all ideologies by converting them to light. Materialism, too, is a concept, an ideology: no more substantial than the invisible air you're breathing right now. Less, actually. Air is more essential than ideology. Ask anyone who's suffocating if they give a damn, in that moment, about anything but their next breath: if they had breath to answer, they would no doubt say, No.

Minahan's comment that Tress' imagination is still essentially unsophisticated—and therefore genuinely creative is striking. He adds: Like children, he hasn't yet lost the capacity to wonder, to see the invisible, to dream in the daytime. The word unsophisticated here strikes me as the opposite of pejorative, which is the way unsophisticated is mostly used in contemporary criticism: as a dismissal rather than a charm. (Again, one finds this more often perhaps among Big City writer/critics.) The Shakers and Amish and Mennonites use the word plain, as in plain appearance, as a word of approval. There remain lessons to be learned from voluntary plainness, from chosen poverty of means that reveals richness of spirit. Children, as Tress reveals, and as children all know, don't need a lot of materials at hand to enhance their play: A cardboard box becomes a castle; an apple tree becomes a rocket ship to the stars; a sidewalk becomes a runway for airplanes to take off and land on. Children often dream of flying, Tress reports, and often they dream of flying away from home or school, into the wide blue unknown.

One can hear the hardcore adults all complaining at this point: But that's not real, there's nothing there—it's illusion, it's make-believe. Well, yes, it is. That's precisely the point. Creativity depends upon imagination, upon play, upon seeing the invisible, upon being unsophisticated, upon being open to wonder, upon wondering itself, upon What if? games, upon dreaming in the daytime.

It's often been said that writing is a solitary practice. But writers need playgroups, too; and they need to learn to play well with others, to share their toys (rather than form critical cliques, one suggests), and to remain open to seeing the invisible.

it is the invisible, after all, that motivates us far more than does anything visible.

Directorial Photography

I want to ponder for a moment a type of photography I almost never engage in: the staged, or directed, photograph.

Out of decades of making photographs, and thousands of images made, I can number less than a dozen efforts on my part at making this kind of photography. (I exempt from this photographs of my land art sculptures, because these are photos of sculptures, not staged set-pieces. Documents and new pieces of art in their own right: the sculptures were not made just to be photographed.) I prefer to work with discovery and exploration. I work almost entirely with found settings, found scenes, and if I direct a model to move within a setting, it is mostly to accentuate a posture or position the model has already found for themselves. It is more collaborative, I feel, than purely directorial.

Directorial photography is nonetheless a style of photography I greatly enjoy, in the hands of its masterful artisans, but one I have never felt moved to undertake seriously in my own work. I prefer to work spontaneously, in the moment, on location, and almost never stage models or events to accomplish a pre-visualized image. Certainly I validate that staged photography is a valid approach, just as is the photography of being-in-the-moment, which I practice much more often. (I also exempt still-life photography from this discussion, as creating an interesting arrangement of found objects to light and photograph, or draw and paint, is not the same thing as arranging a narrative tableau involving live models on a set or location.)

Some of the photographers who practice directed photography are Duane Michals (certainly one of my favorite photographers), Arthur Tress (whose photographs brought on this essay), Cindy Sherman, Bernard Faucon, Leslie Krims, Ralph Eugene Meatyard (another personal favorite, for different reasons than Michals), Richard Kirstel, Lucas Samaras, Clarence John Laughlin, Eikoh Hosoe, and others. I view George Platt Lynes and his circle in this light, too, although some do not.

Let's look at what directed photography actually is, as a practice and a means. Here's an excerpt from A.D. Coleman's Introduction to Arthur Tress' book The Theater of the Mind (1976):

All photographs are fictions, to a far greater extent than we are yet able or willing to acknowledge. Yet most of them still pretend to a high degree of verisimilitude and transparency, to the impersonal neutrality of windows on the world.

It is in the directorial mode of photography more than any other that the fictional nature of the photographic image is not only recognized and explored but openly declared as an active premise, a hermeneutical stance. This mode might most simply be defined as the deliberate staging of events for the express purpose of making photographs thereof—as distinguished from addressing oneself through the camera to an ongoing, uncontrolled external "reality."

Though you wouldn't know it from studying any of the available histories of the medium, the directorial mode of photography has a long, diverse, and honorable tradition. Yet for reasons which appear to have more to do with photo-historical politics than with scholarship and logic, certain uses (and users) of the directorial mode have been accepted as legitimate while others have been rejected out of hand. The basis for these usually arbitrary judgments generally boils down to the conservative taste patterns of the medium's heretofore dominant historians.

Thus it has been considered aesthetically permissible for the late Paul Strand to "cast" his book on an Italian village, Un Paese, by having the townspeople lined up and selecting from them those he considered most picturesque—but unacceptable for Edward Curtis to persuade American Indians to reenact rituals and events out of their past; valid for Edward Weston to arrange vegetables and nudes in static, pre-conceived configurations in his studio—but not for William Mortensen to use his studio as the setting for those mini-dramas which were the basis of his stylized, Symbolist allegories.

I'm sure some photojournalists would argue with Coleman about the fictional nature of photography: their purpose is to report, to present what happened, as nearly as possible, and to capture the moment. But there is still artfulness involved—and artfulness is artifice—after all, the photographer still chooses where and when to make the photo. There is no absolute objective eye watching all; it remains an artful choice, as to what to cover, and what not to. Editing is part of photojournalism, just as it past of reporting. Leaving out the details that are irrelevant to the story, or otherwise unimportant, is accepted without much thought as being just part of the process. So I think Coleman makes some valid points here, that are hard to just dismiss.

Also, as the post-modernist self-aware ironic consciousness has filtered more and more into the arts since Coleman wrote these comments, authorial mastery and transparency has become more suspect in general. There is almost always a question, now, as to whether the photograph can be trusted to be real, or not. Far too many photographic critics nowadays question everything, even family vacation snapshots, to decode them for hidden meanings, often as a criticism of the social status quo. (A priori political or ideological motivations, in other words, that color the critical results.)

Artifice is the root of artificial, and artifice is the craft of making art. Artists are artisans.

One of Coleman's best points is about the problematic distinctions that some historians have made between styles of photography, promoting one style as more valid than another. (It's hard not to see this as a swipe at Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, still the most influential and respected historians of the early American photographic movements and persons.) The point that styles of photography that are presumed to be purely representational nonetheless contain artifice is precisely the point that Edward Weston and Ansel Adams made numerous times, with their various comments that the finished print is not intended to reproduce nature, but rather the photographer's emotional response to what he or she sees. This point was repeated numerous times in their writings, as one of the reasons that photography must be considered to be an art, not just a technical craft. This is also why many people still feel black and white photography to be more inherently artistic than color photography: because it is more artificial. More fictional.

Coleman fails, though, in apparently criticizing Weston in opposition to other photographers, because Coleman misinterprets Weston's creative process. Weston didn't really stage events. While he did arrange vegetables on a table, when he was out photographing with models, he wrote in the Daybooks that his procedure was to let the models move as they wished, and asked them to freeze when he saw a composition or posture he liked. This points out the difference between discovery and pre-arranged tableau. Coleman is misunderstanding what Weston meant when he used terms such as pre-visualization: Weston was not planning the photograph before he ever took it, he was seeing in his mind's eye what the finished print would look like, as he snapped the camera's shutter.

Arthur Tress' series photography work involves the thought-out, frequently pre-arranged tableau; even locations were scouted in preparation, for some of his series. The photo-historic objection against Mortensen had more to do with his painterly use of the photographic medium (as did F. Holland Day and Edward Steichen) to illustrate subjects the same way they were treated in salon painting: this style of soft-focus illustrative photography was exactly what Group f-64, including Weston and Adams, were rebelling against.

The objections against directorial photography, historic and modern, often carry a moral flavor, rather than a purely aesthetic one. A lot of the criticism does come from disciples of the Group f-64 "photography is fine art" school; but it also comes from photojournalists, some of whom are purists about not manipulating the image, even to the point of including technical flaws such as blur and bad exposure.

Of course none of this escapes Coleman's first point about the very artificiality of the medium itself: it's all fiction, even if it strives not to be. Is there any such thing, really, as non-fiction, in any of the arts? If you take this viewpoint to its limits, non-fiction can't exist because all arts, including reportage, are engaged in by humans, who filter information through their own perceptions. There can be no objectivity, ever, in this viewpoint.

This has been taken up in the post-modern critical climate to negate any possibility of critical objectivity: everything is relative, everything is subject to personal taste, everything is subjective, and everything is affected by the local cultural context in which it was produced. This is valid in terms of reclaiming local origins for all art-making and cultural creativity—local as opposed to imperial, and thus a way of re-empowering the formerly or still oppressed—but there is a tendency in this critical trope to discard any notion of the human urge towards universality: to also find those ways in which we are alike, rather than different. Commonalities abound, even between peoples who have language or culture in common: we all live, we all die, we all have emotions to one degree or another, and many of those emotions are sparked by the same stimuli in life—love, sex, envy, hurt, wounds, joy, ecstasy, spiritual experience, what have you. We share some things simply because we are the same species.

The unfortunate result of the post-modern subjective relativistic stance is that we are not supposed to agree that we might agree on some things. We are not supposed to be able to see ourselves in the Other, because we are all too different, too alien to one another. This is obviously absurd. There are those of us who revel in our mutual diversity without ever losing sight of our shared commonalities. Two mothers who have both lost sons, on opposite sides of a war, can come together in their mutual loss and begin the peace process.

Coleman's second paragraph above is the best working definition of directorial photography that I have found. It is fitting that it's to be found in a book of Arthur Tress' photographs. Tress is a master of this style.

My favorite book of Tress' is The Dream Collector, in which the photographer helps the children whose portraits he is taking reenact their dreams and nightmares, using settings, props, and acting to replicate their dreams, visions, and fantasies. The resulting photographs are both humorous and disturbing, beautiful and terrifying, sublime and outrageous. The dream-logic that arises from the archetypes of the deepest parts of the mind has, since the Surrealists and before, been fodder for shock, surprise, awe, and funny juxtapositions in art, for a long time.

Some of the dreams that Tress helps the children reenact are disturbing for adults to see, and Tress has taken heat for this. Adults all too often sentimentalize children, having forgotten or repressed their own childhoods, and want kids to be passively innocent dolls, with no dark sides, no terrors, and no nightmares. We censor scary stories that kids love: but kids know better than adults that it's all pretend, delicious instead of abusive. Tress retains a certain amount of his own childlike wonder in all his photography, which is perhaps why these photos work so well. Clearly they are collaborative. The directorial element in The Dream Collector is perhaps more that of a produce than a director: someone who facilitates the work, rather than dictating it. Tress is, after all, recreating the dreams that the children told him about, who then reenact their dreams for the photograph.

Tress' Theater of the Mind contains a classic photograph that I have never been able to forget. It's one of those iconic images that goes so deep, it seems amazing that no-one thought of it before. This photograph is titled "Bride and Groom." The setting is a bombed-out church nave. A man stands in the wreckage, posed. On his right side, he wears a formal black groom's suit, including tophat and tails, and his hand is raised as though swearing an oath. But on his left side, he is wearing a bride's white dress, and holding out the skirt with his left hand. In one person is united the male and female, bride and groom.

This is nothing if not the sacred wedding, the marriage of opposites in one person, that C.G. Jung wrote about in his late books such as Psychology and Alchemy. The union of opposites. The merging of genders. I do not know if Tress had all of this in mind beforehand, but it is all there in the photo.

The setting appears to the ruins of civilization. There is something symbolic about that: after the fall of everything, then the man the woman shall be one. This is echoed in the Gospel of Thomas, a Gnostic gospel found among the papyruses discovered last century at Nag Hammadi:

Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom of heaven].

All this from one staged photograph.

That shows the power of how a photo can become something iconic, memorable, and archetypal. It is more than just an illustration of an idea. It cuts through the rational linear mind directly to the understanding, in the same way that a painting can bypass the intellect and go directly to the heart's meaning.