Introduction

Thinking While Writing: March 2014

Six months ago, my wife, Rebeca, sent me an email (which was odd considering she was laying next to me in bed) after reading a new reader’s Amazon review for the 2nd edition of my book. The generous reviewer had written, “… James' book revives the discussion about "Imperfection" and its artistic merit. Every alternative print is unique and often imperfect. For the ancient Greeks, perfection was a prime requisite for high art and beauty, and this concept was revived during the Renaissance in art and in architecture. The question is whether artists today “want” to achieve perfection. The very beauty of alternative processes is its imperfection and unpredictability, and therein lies the beauty of such images. And each image is unique and irreproducible. There is also the great appeal of a haptic (referring to the sense of touch) approach that is missing in digital photography and in so many other high technology fields.”

Rebecca, who is inclined to see all things within their relationships to the natural world, wrote, “The beauty of alternative process IS the imperfection of these images… and our desire for it today stems from the cultural erosion of our connections to nature.”

This example of a dialogue, in which a discussion of syntax instigates a philosophical conversation about important things that are lost, or missing, is of huge interest to me… and especially true when considering the hand-made alternative photographic image and our emotional connections to the unique and imperfect beauty of those processes and their artifacts.

Six months after Rebecca’s bedtime email, I was doing some research on critical thinkers who had been engaged with the brand new medium of photography during the mid 1800s. I spent a few hours considering their unique experiences with this amazing invention as they were not only seeing the first images from the new medium, they were having dinner with the people who were making them. I began to make some notes on what I had been reading and thinking… and as I wrote, working on the laptop in my Dublin, NH studio at the end of summer, this exposition began to take shape and turned into this piece that I am offering to you now.

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FM-34 here, Hill & Adamson - Lady Elizabeth Eastlake (Eleanor Rigby) - 1849 (salted paper print from a calotype negative)

The more perfectly you render an imperfect thing, the more inevitable the imperfections of that thing must be acknowledged. In the case of photography, where the primary intention was to reflect the perfection of nature, it is a feeble endeavor. One of the big questions on the table in the mid-1800s, being discussed by athletic and agile intellects such as Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, Sir William Newton, and Peter Henry Emerson, was whether the imperfections of photography were actually closer to our aesthetic feelings for art because the imperfections represented our personal experiences with nature, rather than nature itself… in a manner similar to representational painting.

In 1857, Lady Elizabeth Eastlake surmised that beyond mere light and appearance, which are the perfect scientific abilities of the medium, are found the beautiful conditions of photography that reflect the viewer’s imagination and personal life references. From this vantage, when greater precision and detail are added to the image (she used the word superadded) the eye will miss the personal truths that function as the visual connective and emotional tissue between the viewer and the work.

Sir William Newton created a great scandal within the Royal Photographic Society by uttering aloud his personal opinion that pictures taken slightly out of focus, with uncertain and ill-defined forms, were more artistically beautiful than perfect still life reflections in the manner of a 17th century Dutch painting; those lovely and warm renderings of dead game, hanging root vegetables, and bowls of fruit of on the tables owned by the painter or painter’s patron at the time.

Newton essentially offered the conflicting proposition that the worse photography performed its assigned job, the more successful it was at representing the ideals of art. Newton’s hypothesis, along the lines of Emerson’s great torment over whether photography could be enjoyed as an art or a science, created one of the first photo-critical firestorms. Sir Newton’s argument was met with a lazy response that the possibility of capital “A” Art in the midst of all this perfect science was heresy. A simple example of how to see this conflict is to compare a reproduction of a saint named St. Matthew on a museum greeting card rack to one on a plaster panel painted in full-blown mystery by Caravaggio. Emerson insisted that photography ranked as the lowest of all the arts because the individuality of the artist had no room within the science to show itself. He was wrong of course. When the contextual mystery is missing, so too is the human experience and its connection to life… which is always a mystery.

If I may, there is an equivalent reference in the mammoth color photographic prints that are so currently in vogue in graduate schools, museums, and “cutting-edge” galleries. These humungous images strip the human experience away and amplify the premise that photographic science and reproduction technology is capable of enhancing and shocking your aesthetic experience by showing you a pimple as large as a manhole cover… big deal.

Let’s begin…

From its inception, photography has never been a single, identifiable, technology or process. Throughout its evolution, the medium has been a slowly moving glacier of change, adaptation, and obsolescence followed closely by another metaphorical glacier influenced by the heat of science, industry, technology, aesthetics, and cultural. I think of these separate entities as I do the boulders I find in the woods near my studio… evidence of the glacier’s melting. Each of these transformations, the great majority of them overlapping, has ushered in an ever-greater democratization of photographic image making and resulting public adoption and adaptation. Each of these cycles have had the same family name regardless of how odd the offspring appeared… and they have always shared the genus, in a philosophical sense, a class of things that share common characteristics, and DNA of photography… that of making marks with light.

In 1829, in a letter to Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre wrote the well known sentiment that he was burning with desire to see Niépce’s experiments from nature. Not a great deal has changed since that sentiment was expressed except for the way in which the desire to make and look at photographs is satiated. In the midst of our current photographic and digital revolution there is the unlimited potential of integrating it all under the proverbial big-tent of alternative photographic practice and possibly making this the most exciting time in the photographic arts in over a century.

Photography was set free from the yoke of representation several decades ago. It is unnecessary, and ultimately counter-productive, for an artist using the language of photography to be required to choose one style of image making over another. The most constructive strategy is to take the parts that work for you, from every discipline that interests you, and to incorporate them into your photographic vision and workflow. I love that I can make pictures on my iPhone and send them to you. I feel very differently about my wet collodion ferrotypes and ambrotypes. My personal investment in learning to make them gracefully was quite different. As a result, the investment of time bestows a greater value and meaning upon them for me.

When I make a wet collodion plate, I make it forever. When I make a picture with my iPhone, I make it for the moment. Philosophically, it is the difference between making your Eggplant Parmesan with a hand-made sauce that has been simmering for 24 hours and buying you a frozen version of the same meal that I’ll heat in a microwave oven. They are both Eggplant Parmesan, but they are both not Eggplant Parmesan. One you will talk about each time you visit, the other you will easily forget.

The invention of photography, and its ultimate mass democraticization, as represented in the inexpensive and easily procured tintype and ambrotype, changed the role of the painter in society. For the first time, it was not a requirement to be wealthy or powerful, as an individual or institution, to commission a painter to depict a likeness of oneself… or of one’s theology or position. Faced with this reality, painters were excused from the obligation of representing the way a subject actually looked and were compelled to explore the way it felt, what the subject might represent metaphorically, how the artist’s perspectives could be discussed conceptually and figuratively rather than objectively, in harmony with the unique impressions that the artist expressed with her paint.

Where a photograph’s task once was to relentlessly recreate perfection, often more perfect than the human eye could ever hope to experience, with the exception of the accidental artifact, it lacked the element of gesture that a painter, faced with the task of pleasing the vanity of others, could inject in a representational painting. My grandfather, Alexander James, a gifted painter and studio partner of John Singer Sargent, used to solve the problem when painting pot-boiler (because they kept the soup-pot full) portraits of admirals, and wealthy patrons, with a bold stroke of red or green as a highlight on an ear, edge of a nose, or on the arch of an eyebrow…. his personal tip of the hat to the artist within.

This simplicity of gesture, so prevalent in the earliest days of the medium, became an identifiable strength that was associated with the adventure that reflected the beginning of photography. This would continue into the early 1900s in the hands of photographic artists using commercially produced flexible film and silver gelatin paper. Often, the emotional reflection of that spontaneity was the result of a movement unfrozen, or chemical aberration, fortuitous accident, or post-print manipulation… enchanting qualities found in most hand-made alternative process work.

From this perspective, as digital imaging absorbs the roles of photography and adopts the attributes and qualities of photographic representation, is it possible to tell the difference between the original analog and the new digital? Wasn’t that the point? Is photography now free to become, as painting did, something entirely new?

I believe it is.

In 1859, Charles Baudelaire wrote, “If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether.” I wonder if he ever considered the implications of being wrong? And what would he think about the state of the medium today?

I am inclined to believe, especially in an academic sense, that photography may no longer need to insist that it be curated and studied as an exclusive medium. It’s entirely possible that its greatest opportunity lies in being integrated with, and layering its influences upon, all of the arts... and not being subject to the visual theologies that fracture the discipline into “schools” of disciples who think and see what is often simply nothing more than a new set of party clothes for the Emperor.

Regardless, many are still in a defensive crouch about “their” medium and concerned with many of the same issues that permeated through the salons of the mid-late 1800s and the Photo Secessionists… where critical judgment was evaluated by the expected perfection of process and not by its artistic expression or the beautiful conditions of imperfection that reveal the artist’s, and the viewer’s, personal life references and imagination.

To me, photography is unquestionably evolving into a medium that will soon require a new definition. From an alternative process perspective, one that I believe is the spear tip in this new adventure, the flexibility of these processes present a perfect marriage partner to almost all of the arts that are willing to see what will happen if they take the proverbial plunge. To the upcoming generations of photographic artists, schooled with the pixilated imagery and battery-dependent tools of digital imaging, using one’s hands to make an image is a persuasive argument simply because it is almost always imperfect… and as a result, a profound and precise reflection of us all.