Final Fire

by Michael Mitchell

  However, the first practical photographic technology was Daguerre’s. Announced in 1839, the daguerreotype consisted of a silvered copper plate developed in mercury. It was, in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s beautiful phrase, “a mirror with a memory.” Instantly embraced, it was just what Western culture had been waiting for. Now that the mirror’s memory had been fixed, we could accurately record and inventory the world around us. The new technology quickly jumped the English Channel and, a heartbeat later, crossed the Atlantic.

  It was a wonder; it was transformative; it destroyed myths; it changed everything. It was the perfect visual technology for an age of imperialism. We could now take possession. To photograph something was to master it. At last we knew.

  By the mid-19th century practical improvements to the medium allowed it to go on a tear and nobody embraced the new medium like Americans. An estimated 30 million photographs were made there between 1840 and 1860. As might be expected in the land of extreme individualism, 95 percent of those images were portraits. But photographers also set out across the globe to record the world’s wonders. And the world has never been the same since. Truly.

  Photography was the perfect image-maker for the New World because it was free of history. The many visual traditions that dogged European painters of landscapes, the nature morte or the portrait didn’t have the same hold on photographers. While traces of those traditions clung to the work of many picture-takers, on the whole it was a fresh medium that encouraged new ways of seeing. Cameras encouraged viewing from new angles — from below, from above, even within. And the edges and corners of photographs seemed to almost arbitrarily slice through objects in a way that was foreign to pictorial traditions but soon came to be liberating. Photography and photographers have also enlarged our sense of what is significant and what is beautiful to now include: crushed cans, cigarette butts, industrial units and even the dead. The medium also allows us to edit the world, to break it down into manageable pieces that can be possessed and controlled.

  Western culture was the perfect incubator for a medium like photography. A culture that fostered literacy conditioned people to privilege the eye as the main sense organ for interpreting the world. Some cultures and many animals rely on the nose, the ear or touch. And a culture that had laboured long and hard to perfect the clock so that time could be subdivided and measured set the stage for a medium that could arrest it. Moreover, a culture that was busy mechanizing and industrializing what had traditionally been the work of the hand both needed and was prepared for a medium that automated picture-making. It made perfect sense that France, and especially England, were the cradles of photography.

  The relationship to time and the recording of the moment created images that were unprecedented. The new medium created a revolution for the eye. Vision was disrupted and industrialized. American photographs of the Civil War showed the true face of battle — the muddy disorder, the ugly banality of death, the pointless destruction. The myths and heroics of painters were hooked off the stage. Reality was thrown in the face of myth.

  1968

  As a graduate student in anthropology during the late ’60s I just accepted the poorly printed, journeyman photographs that illustrated ethnographic and archaeological reports. However, one day while leafing through a well-known Meso-American archaeologist’s report on the ancient city of Teotihuacan outside Mexico City, I turned a page to a photograph he’d made of the so-called Pyramid of the Sun. I’d seen photographs of it many times before but this one was different. Although not a photographer, he had the benefit of decades of work in its shadow. He’d ascended it many times and viscerally understood its mass, how high and steep it was. And through archaeology he’d deepened his knowledge of its builders. Consequently, his photograph of it managed, without the crutch of dramatic lighting or tricky perspective, to give it a presence that I’d never experienced before. It was enormous, it was the culmination of the tremendous effort of a people. It confirmed power and faith. It was so there, so present, so incredible. It was not just a pile of rock. It was belief.

  I was all too familiar with the way the painters in my family enhanced the presence of their subjects by altering the position of elements in the scene before them and by concentrating on details of the central subject in their paintings. But I’d never seen this done in an apparently mechanical and indifferent medium such as photography. The decisions that archaeologist had made while taking the picture were subtle but revelatory. I’m sure that many photographs he made during decades of field seasons had informed this final triumphant vision of this ancient culture’s greatest monumental achievement. He’d managed to distill all his knowledge and experience into a single revelatory photograph. It was unforgettable. I began to get more curious about the medium.

  The camera imposes a vanishing point perspective on vision that isn’t necessarily cognate with our experience of the world as we move through it. This becomes obvious when one reflects on all the global cultures, past and present, which ignored or failed to develop perspective in their visual arts. The Paleolithic cave painter clearly didn’t experience space like Canaletto. He saw game, he saw the hunter but not the mountain, valley or plain. They were incidental, non-essential, irrelevant and hence effectively invisible so they weren’t rendered.

  Photography caught me by surprise. Picture making was almost a family business. My mother’s businessman father had been an accomplished Sunday painter, friend of A.Y. Jackson and, at one time, employer of Casson. Two of his daughters, my mother and her younger sister Barbara, graduated from the Ontario College of Art in the early 1940s. My mother painted and taught art her whole life while her sister Barbara became an art teacher at Central Tech and longtime Arctic travelling companion of painter Doris McCarthy. Even my sister became an artist and teacher.

  When I began exploring with a camera in the early ’70s it became a way of escaping the self and embracing the outside. Freed, in a sense, from myself, I could engage with the world and connect with my fellow human beings. Many beginning photographers find it difficult to photograph people on the streets. They fear confrontations, a fist in the face. Street photography is perfectly legal but invasive. In order to get over this anxiety I devised an exercise for myself. I borrowed a wide-angle lens for the Pentax I then had and walked early one morning to the Royal York Hotel in downtown Toronto. At the west end of the hotel there’s a revolving door through which patrons exited to get a cab or board a bus for the airport. I positioned myself right in front of it so that the doors filled my viewfinder — very close. For an entire day I remained in that spot. I photographed every single person who emerged from the hotel.

  By day’s end only one individual, a businessman rushing with a briefcase, had questioned what I was doing. I briefly explained my exercise: he shrugged, got on the airport bus and disappeared. I had learned how to be confident but non-threatening. Over the next four decades I photographed politicians, business leaders, revolutionaries, soldiers, famous writers, actors, athletes, musicians, artists, heroes and criminals without incident. The only people who could never handle it were cops.

  My next confrontation was over 40 years later in Kensington Market. I had staked out a position at a key intersection of the market and was photographing faces on the street with a very long lens. If people seemed disturbed, turned away or covered their faces I lowered the camera and let them pass. A corner coffee shop there had seats in the window. A half-dozen rough-looking guys sat watching me while they nursed their coffees. As I could see them getting agitated I avoided pointing the lens in their direction. Nevertheless I could sense that they were working themselves up. Finally the woman who owned the shop came toward me screaming. What was I doing photographing people without their permission? Those weaselly window guys didn’t have the guts to confront me and make their own trouble — they got this woman to do it.

  Faces on the streets of Toronto’s Kensington Market

  I still take photogra
phs nearly every day but seldom carry a camera everywhere. Not only does the staggering volume of images one can generate with a digital camera become unmanageable but the camera and its viewfinder/screen eventually becomes an interface that can distance one from the world. It’s like an earbud for the eye. And drive-by shooting rarely yields anything more than anecdotes and fleeting curiosities. It takes greater planning and intention to make an enduring photograph. Most great photographers’ life’s work can be summarized in a score of images — or less. Making a memorable photograph, one that engages a number of people over time, is very difficult. It takes years. It rarely happens.

  ***

  This is a morning of flying fours. As I watch four elegant terns circle and dive I realize that four Canada geese are paddling single file westbound beneath them down the inlet toward the open Bay. Then a low chortling makes me look up from the water and I watch four sandhill cranes fly across the inlet toward me. They pass directly overhead: their calls have been echoing across this planet since the Pliocene. They are the most ancient and beautiful of birds. Their survival is both a miracle and a mystery.

  At the very heart of photography there is a mystery, not just the old magic of silver nitrate responding to light — although that is seductive enough — but also a photograph’s function as memory, as a marker in time. The decision to press the shutter release can be as important a marker as the resultant image itself. Without doubt most images that result from that act, especially in the digital age, are never looked at again. It was the act of taking the picture that was important. The taker is like a dog pissing on a tree, staking out territory, taking possession of place and time to declare you are my lover, these are my children, my house, my car, my life. I saw. This was, I am.

  There are also temporal and spatial mysteries. What happened just before and after the picture taking? Whose hand is that on the frame’s edge? Whose boot is at the bottom? What took place behind the photographer? Why record this subject at all?

  Students frequently get stuck and take the same photos repeatedly. Whenever this happened while I was teaching at Banff we would often grab a student about to make a picture and turn them 180 degrees before they made their exposure. It was a good habit breaker and occasionally it was revelatory.

  ***

  I just want this evening in Georgian Bay to go forever — the soft warm wind sighing through the pines, a burble of small waves, a distant whippoorwill and Bill Frisell’s Good Dog, Happy Man. Solitude.

  A photo supply salesman enters my studio with a delivery and looks around. When he spots two large Infinity speakers hanging on either side of the set he remarks that every busy photographic studio that he’s ever been in has a great sound system. It’s true. And the intense connection between photography, photographers and music is one of the medium’s many mysteries. Surely one reason is that both are time-based media — music deals in time’s flow while photography is based on arresting it. Music gives photographers some continuity.

  Ansel Adams played piano and dreamed of being a concert pianist. Aaron Siskind played violin, Lee Friedlander has long been passionate about jazz and gospel and made photographs about Charles Ives and New Orleans funeral bands. The Canadian painter Charles Gagnon, who also took many photographs, had a recording studio. Geoffrey James plays jazz trumpet. Another photographic friend played both cello and piano. Arnaud Maggs, who loved jazz, designed the original cover for Jazz at Massey Hall and made a large photo piece about all the jazz albums on the Prestige label and another based on the Köchel catalogue numbers of Mozart’s compositions. Maggs once told me about taking a piece he’d written to Oscar Peterson and his band at a club in Montreal. Peterson was gracious but his band started to play Arnaud’s piece in such a way as to gently show him how derivative and banal it was. Arnaud went back to graphic design and photography.

  The great Czech photographer Josef Sudek would exclaim, “A hudbe hraje . . .” (“And the music plays . . .”) from under his dark cloth whenever he felt he was making a great negative. And nothing has given me more pleasure than working my way through a large orchestra in rehearsal to make photographs.

  When various members of the Toronto Symphony asked me to photograph them in Vienna’s Musikverein during a tour I didn’t have a large enough format camera to ensure that all 100 or so players would be identifiable. I borrowed one from a string player in the band and had the larger format film shipped in from my supplier in Frankfurt. So it goes both ways.

  ***

  My island is little more than a rock. At 0.374 acres it is much smaller than the islands 20 miles to the south that I inherited from my mother’s family. Down there I had a hundred-year-old cedar board and batten cottage with three bedrooms and a big stone fireplace in the living room. The building huddled on the east end of a four-acre island — early summer people had seen the west wind and open water as a threat. The island had never been logged so the white pines of its interior were majestic. Perhaps once a year I’d scrabble my way around the island getting scratched by junipers of the understorey. It took me years to realize that I didn’t need to own all that land. I really only dwelt on the point where the building sat. There was also a big uninhabited island immediately south. I owned several acres of it as well. It was famous for its blueberries and rattlesnakes. I didn’t need to own it either. I picked berries there once a year, usually to the protests of my American co-owners who would leap into their boats and run over to tell me to get off. For me they were foreigners kicking me off my own land. For them there were no borders. They owned the world.

  The TSO in the Golden Hall at Vienna’s Musikverein, photographed with a borrowed camera

  So I sold the family place to a friend and eventually gave my part of the second island to a charitable land trust. Now its snakes could live in permanent peace and I sought refuge farther north where there were few people and even fewer boats.

  I’m now the custodian of less than half an acre but have a much more intimate relationship with it. The tiny pockets of soil in its declivities support one alder, three white birches, 22 cedars, 26 white pines and one jack. I know every one of them and can look after their welfare. The shoreline is barely a dozen feet from the lip of my big screen porch. I know it intimately too. Now, after many successive years of low water, the level has risen a couple of feet and presented a new coast. Not only is its contour different but so is its music. I knew well the songs of the waves when they reached my small shore. This year they’re all different as they break on new mini headlands and curl in different hollows. It’s a whole new songbook.

  2000

  The Austrian cellist Clemens Hagen and I are stuck at the back of the bus. We’re racing with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra from concert hall to hall across western Europe — Germany, Hungary, and his Austria. At every stop I have the wincing experience of following him as he crashes his Stradivarius cello down the bus steps in a plastic case. Here is a guy who plays beautifully but is seemingly indifferent to the noisy beating he gives his instrument at each disembarkation.

  Great musicians can be incredibly narrow in their perceptions and appreciations. Their skills have demanded such unrelenting focus since childhood on the development of a small set of finger, tongue, lip and lung skills that they can be very underdeveloped in other areas — they’ve had no time. In Budapest I made a portrait of Clemens playing that members of the TSO administration thought wonderful. When Clemens saw it he was completely indifferent. He was all ear, not eyes.

  And similarly photography isolates sight from all the other senses.

  Clemens Hagen, cellist

  1984

  It’s five a.m. on a February morning. I’ve just spent a night on the ground a few hundred feet from the Honduras border. The high buzz of insects has tensioned the tropical night as rats run over us as we try to sleep. The several hundred Sandinista soldiers lying around me are getting up and preparing for a firefight in
which some of them will die. Many of them are still in their teens. I rise, load a half-dozen Hasselblad magazines, and begin prowling through our camp taking photographs. The men briefly face me, their minds focused on the perils just minutes into the future as the sun climbs to illuminate a soon slaughter.

  I work, totally focused on the moment and the men. The world seems trapped in ice as I make pictures for precious minutes before the commanders call and the troops form units that quickly slip off into the bush. When I’m left alone in the camp the world suddenly rushes back in like a breaking wave — smells, rushing sounds, transforming sights. It is no longer suspended in secret silence. It breathes, sighs, sings and moves. Touch returns. I’m no longer a mono-sensed photographer, both celebrant and prisoner of the eye, but a medium-sized mammal swimming in a complex sensual surround — immersed, buried, overwhelmed by the business of the world. All my senses are now awake.

  The hunter in a preliterate culture lives in a rich, multi-signal, synaesthetic sensorium. He makes his way through the forest keenly aware of sound, smell, temperature and air movement in addition to sight. All his senses are fully developed and on high alert — operating in concert. But we have learned to fragment and isolate our senses. When fully engaged in making a photograph I’ve always been conscious of senses dropping away as I slipped into a space that’s purely visual. It’s like being an athlete or performer entering the “zone.”

  I still have a basement full of enlargers and darkroom gear. There’s also a cupboard-load of film camera bodies and negative files to remind me of the shift from analogue to digital. Like many older photographers I half miss the dim rooms with amber light, the sound of gently burbling water and the image slowly swimming up — unforgettable! A certain alchemy is forever gone with digital. Not only are the fluid sounds gone but so are the smells of stop and hypo and the tactile tooth of photo papers. All are superfluous, superseded and superannuated along with obscure skills like feeling for sheet film code notches in the dark and spooling fragile film blind onto reels for processing. The romance of process is gone as well as a certain magic. Now only the eye is triumphant.