Originally photography had, in a sense, a foot in magic. Daguerre, the Parisian who gave the world the first mass photographic process, was a showman in the business of large public illusions. His dioramas wrapped his audiences in evolving, fantastic landscapes. It was theatre with elaborate sets but no actors. He thought a perfected photography would be an aid in their production.
With each technological change there are losses and gains. In a crude way digital has restored the old view camera experience of the world swirling with life on the camera’s ground glass. The new cameras’ small screens don’t have the mystery of image being reversed right to left and upside down or the theatre of the dark cloth over the head, but they do give a sense of what the world made flat in a picture is going to look like.
My many long assignment flights up the spine of the Americas, across the Atlantic or the long Pacific grind home from Asia were returns to a great unknown. Had your eyes been acute, fingers fast, your meters accurate and had the film moved through the gate? Would there be static flashes from the arctic cold, film fog from aggressive airport X-rays or degradation from the heat? To return to YYZ was to pace exhausted in a lab while your stock was dipped and dunked or roller transported through the soup. And then the final hunch over a light table louping dozens of processed rolls and sheets for dirt, scratches and careless focus. Did you have the shoot?
Digital removed all this. The fast feedback allowed more focus on the idea and the purely visual. It accelerated one’s development as an image-maker as one could refine one’s approach shot by shot rather than shoot by shoot. It permitted risk as failed exposures no longer meant successive dollar bills cranked through the camera back by a motor drive. Now there were few costs. And it was also easier on the back as there was less to carry. A bag of loaded 4x5 sheet film holders weighs a thousand times more than an SD card and stores less information. A hard drive can store hundreds of fat albums. The packs of light balancing gel filters have been replaced by the white balance button. Overall, there is less stuff, fewer consumables and poisons.
Many had gotten sick in the darkrooms of the world — weird cancers and respiratory inflammations. We were all playing with acids and heavy metals so this was predictable. While I needed the observational discipline imposed by photography as I moved about the world it was severely limited by the demands of the darkroom. The world roared by outside the dark door while one was agitating film, rocking trays and pouring toxins down drains. Analogue did have the advantage of being physical and tactile — burning and dodging by hand, chemical mixing, tray rocking and interleaving the wash. Now photographers stare at computer screens. This too is isolating but less alienating. There is light, people pass by and the big world flirts just beyond the window. Today digital’s wastes kill electronics recyclers in China rather than here. We’ve off-shored the poisonings.
However, the computer and the various image processing and manipulation programs developed for it have led to a lot of over-processed imagery — too much total contrast, too edge-enhanced, oversaturated and too cleaned up. Honest images of the world’s wonderful messiness are being rendered down into tidy graphics. This impoverishes our experience of the world and makes us less capable of dealing with its complexities. The quiet, disordered beauty of the world is being superseded by contrivances that shout. These screeching, supersaturated pictures tire the eye.
Our burden as a species is our big brain and too much consciousness. We are astonished by our existence and the world’s but also know we are going to die. Our family histories tell us it will be at 45, 60 or a decade later or more or less. Both my parents went at 81 so there is a good probability I will leave the building then too. Now 71, I can reasonably count on a decade — 3,600 or so mornings filling my espresso machine, checking email, phoning friends, doing the dishes, planning for my 10th last summer, making pictures and procrastinating. Here lies one of the miracles of photography. Every photograph of me answers an “Am I?” with an “I am!” And every photograph I take is an affirmation of being, of both myself and my subject and our world. The release of the shutter is an existential act.
***
The wind sifts through the pines hissing like poured sugar.
I love this landscape but I can’t photograph it. This is probably for the simple reason that it’s been the great constant in my life since childhood. I don’t have the need. I know it.
Yet another photographer colleague has invited me to help select his work for a show. This always dismays me: it seems essential if one is to claim to be an artist in the medium of photography that one be capable of confidently editing one’s own work. We are not painters or sculptors or writers, people who manually create their statements: instead we do it by machine. The art is in the selection — from the moment one interrupts the flow of time with a shutter while choosing a tiny rectangle from the great dome of physical reality that surrounds us. This act is an edit and editing is all that we’ve got. If you can’t do that from the first step on through to selecting from contact sheets or digital files then your status as an artist is seriously diminished. It’s as if you don’t recognize your own themes, your own take on the world and experience. It’s the edit that clarifies what your work is about. Without that you have little to contribute. You are a cameraman, not an artist.
***
I carefully walked my 0.34 acres this early July morning and counted 29 different species in bloom. They range from chives, bluebells and a pair of orange poppies that have reseeded annually since a planting over a decade ago to the balance which are wild and indigenous — white and purple iris, columbines, daisies.
1979
We’re gathered in a classroom at Banff. I’m trying to teach about 20 photographers for the summer. Most of them are recent grads from art schools right across the country. They’re smart, ambitious and arrogant. Each morning we gather to discuss one another’s work. Generally the women take photographs with traditional female themes — children, gardens, domestic life and portraits. However their takes on these subjects can be quite fresh and arresting. Today the presenters are all guys. They’ve been out photographing the mountains and their pictures are terrible. At best they look like postcards — scenic, remote and affectless. The women stare at these pictures in silence. They are utterly unmoved as am I. These images are dead.
As I begin to talk about them I start to get a notion of what has gone wrong. I began showing them photographs made by the first photographers of the American West — Jackson, Weed, Muybridge and Watkins. Those 19th century men had ridden out on the new rails being driven through a raw landscape in quest of the Pacific. When the tracks ended somewhere on the Great Plains or the Great Basin they got off and mounted horses or walked westward. It was hot, dry and dusty. They were thirsty and their legs ached and their feet hurt. If they decided to make a view from an eminence they climbed it on foot dragging huge view cameras and crates of glass plates up slope with them. Every plate was precious — making an exposure was a commitment to hours of darkroom work after all the gear had been lugged back down to safety. You didn’t fool around.
Their pictures were terrific. The mountains and valleys had a gritty presence that took you right to them and held you there. These photographs were vivid and intelligent because their makers had a real body sense of just how desiccated it all was, how hot, how steep, how threatening and overwhelming. My 20th century students were driving along the Trans-Canada in air-conditioned cars, pulling over whenever they recognized a nice view. Their cameras had motor drives that pulled long rolls of film through the gate. They could expose now and think about it later. They were drive-by shooters. Their photographs were betrayed by inexperience. I told them to put on hiking boots. They told me they didn’t have the time.
While retrieving my bags in the Calgary airport a few years later I discover that the big guy beside me has the same destination that I do — the art school at Banff. On the bus ride through the foothills
I learn that Smith is there to teach paper-making while I’m to do the same for colour photography. At Banff I discover that the school’s colour lab and darkrooms have not been replaced since a big fire several years earlier. Not only are there no photo facilities but there are also no photography students. And the handful of visual art students present have little interest in my medium. Rather than spend 10 days drinking beer while staring at Mount Rundle I elect to team up with the paper-maker.
We decide that any deficiencies of the Banff Centre will be overcome if the school’s main staircase is enriched with a large mural created by both of us. As we set to work I soon realize that the paper guy is a much better long-term strategic thinker than me. The vast quantity of fibrous pulp required for this three-dimensional work of genius will be cotton. The cotton will be obtained by grinding up the jeans and shorts of consenting young women in the program and the coloured batches will be derived from their blouses and panties. This pulp will require screening in a large water bath. The school’s Jacuzzi will suffice. Unfortunately one cannot enter this therapeutic pool with clothes on. We eagerly anticipated surmounting this limitation.
Much to my surprise a handful of beautiful young women agree to participate, no doubt figuring that we are just a pair of entertaining, but harmless, geezers — we are at least the age of their fathers. When the horrified administration discovers our plan we are banned from the Jacuzzi on the grounds that ground-up girl shorts will plug up the pool pumps. To ensure the administration that cotton pulp is harmless Smith enters the president’s office and drinks an entire quart of watery panty pulp. The boss is too slack-jawed to say no.
To give our near-naked romp in the jet pool some current cultural cred we program Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach over the centre’s P.A. system. Then we jump in the pool with the girls and start screening. A few hours later we have produced a 10-foot-long abstraction, a lumpy hybrid of Frankenthaler, Rothko and de Kooning. It is so thick that it takes several days to dry. The night of the day it does we sneak a ladder into the staircase and install our masterpiece high overhead. It was still there the next day and the next and the day we both departed for Ontario. Its fate remains one of Canadian art history’s great mysteries.
1979
When I was hired by the Ontario College of Art to teach students colour photography, I dove into the job but soon found it all a bit hopeless. The colour lab was equipped with the little plastic print-processing drums and plug-in rollers that were sold in photo hobby shops. This primitive gear didn’t allow for the accurate temperature controls crucial for consistent results. Additionally the prints frequently emerged from the drums streaked and stained. The students were discouraged and demoralized. Another problem was that they worked in a historical vacuum. The library had few books on colour photography and no teaching slide sets. The students had no clue what serious photographers had done with the colour medium. There were no possibilities to show them and no tradition to build from.
I set about single-handedly and single-mindedly to address these deficiencies. As I had by then accumulated a studio stuffed with classic photographic monographs it was possible to address the school’s image deficit. I began making teaching slides for my course by copying material from my books. However the printmaking side of my classes was more problematic. There was no budget for the purchase of a professional processor. As I got more familiar with the institution I discovered that there was, however, a substantial budget for maintenance. My putting one and two together spanned the country.
I had recently taught for a summer at Banff. A few months after I returned to Toronto the building that housed the Banff Centre’s colour lab had burned down. The head of the photography program, Hugh Hohn, had collared his staff in the middle of the night and they’d run into the burning building, disconnected all the cables and plumbing on the big Kreonite roller-transport, print processor and carried it, like pallbearers, out of the building. They staggered through the snow to an adjacent building and jammed it under a staircase. It sat there for months, homeless.
I got on the phone. Since the machine was orphaned and the photography program consequently suspended, could I make some arrangement to better shelter the precious machine? As the spring term drew to a close a deal was struck. The Banff Centre would lend the processor to OCA; OCA would use its maintenance budget to restore and repair it. I had almost solved the second of my big course dilemmas. Only a couple of thousand miles stood between the parts of my solution.
Once again I went tin-cupping to the OCA administration. If they would buy me a few tanks of gas I would drive my Chevy delivery van at term’s end across the country to Banff and retrieve the Kreonite. I got the gas money.
The next phone call was to persuade my old friend Macbeth that a drive across Canada was the perfect tonic for his depression. I was very lucky that he agreed because he’s the kind of guy you can stick in the driver’s seat while you sleep for 10 hours knowing that you’ll wake up far away from where you passed out. Anyone who has done that drive understands that half the trip is getting out of Ontario. As an Italian acquaintance who’d once come over from Rome to do that odyssey complained, it was a matter of a tree, a rock, a river, a lake and then another tree, rock, river and lake for hours and hours and days until the final release of the open prairie. He’d suffered acute spruce fatigue.
A meeting of the original Banff pallbearers was convened and beered. We gently grunted the big machine into my truck. It filled the entire space from the driver’s seatback to the rear doors. I thought we’d lost our travel accommodations but there proved to be just enough top clearance to house a couple of occupied sleeping-bags — we were skinny guys then. The flat top of the processor became a double bed. We gassed up and set off for the East.
The program improved. However I was still stuck with a part-timer’s Saturday class in addition to my degree-bound students. The weekend class was very difficult to teach. There were women in it who only wanted to photograph their kittens or do underwater shots of their synchronized swimming sessions. On the other hand there were a couple of people who had big view cameras, understood the Ansel Adams zone system and were seeking transcendence. One of them was the sophisticated head of an important publishing house. How can one be useful to such a diversity? I didn’t want half the class to be taught up or down to while others were bored.
The classes for full-timers during the week were easier. My biggest challenge there was the latest tech toy from Japan — the Sony Walkman. Most students had one and so during the lecture portion of my classes I’d have to walk down the aisles plunking off headphones as I talked. Sprong! Sprong!! The worst offender, the self-proclaimed coolest guy in the whole school, ended up a server in a College Street restaurant.
1980
This year it’s my turn to sit on the admissions committee at the Ontario College of Art. We convene in a large room with tables piled high with submissions from across Canada and the Caribbean. The latter are extremely difficult to assess. One is acutely conscious of the limited instruction they have had on their little island nations. How does one see past the basic and often obsolete exercises they have been given to some germ of talent?
This year the larger issue is the enormous number of applicants who want to become wildlife painters. The layperson often assumes that the essential prerequisite for success in the visual arts is something we call skill. In actual fact skill is all too common: it’s original ideas and something we might call vision that are rare. The tables before us are carpeted with skillful renderings of flora and fauna. These applicants have so much control over their pens and brushes that you can literally detect their source materials, their signature characteristics are so faithfully rendered. They usually work by projecting slides and copying them so faithfully that a photographer who really knows his materials can detect what type of film was used for the original source.
After reviewing so many dozens of these portf
olios I begin to amuse myself by deconstructing the source imagery. So here we have a Kodachrome forest clearing in which an Ektachrome wolf stalks an Agfacolor deer. Every nuance of the grain structure of these emulsions along with their characteristic colour biases are reproduced in these paintings. It’s quite mindless. Are these people artists, illustrators or copyists? Can these skills ever evolve into anything more than demonstrations of dexterity? The rendering talents of Frederick Verner, the 19th century Canadian painter of First Nations encampments and voyageurs running rapids devolved in the hands of his descendants into illustrations of dress shoes drawn for ads in Toronto newspapers. Do shoe artists, as they were known, deserve special nurturing by society? Is there any value in these skills in an age of photography? We’re placing bets on the futures of these hopeful applicants and probably getting it wrong more often than right.
By my third year of teaching I’d had enough. I taught Thursdays through Saturdays. Inevitably I’d be finishing up some photo assignment in Vancouver, California or even Europe on a Wednesday night and realize I had to take a red-eye to Toronto to give a class the next day. I was enjoying one of those brief periods — they come and go — when I was the hot guy to art directors. I had lots of assignments and was being well paid whereas part-time college instructors are the gleaners of the academic world. They work very hard for a few droppings. When I looked around at the full-time faculty at the college they all seemed to be coasting downstream toward their pensions. I decided to freelance full-time and make whatever art I could in the interstices. I now had a wife and kids. I became a professional photo cowboy.
Final Fire Page 6
