A Narrow Foothold

Maybe the best way to start this is to ask the most obvious question: Why collaborate?

Well I think we’ve been “collaborating” in a sense for quite a long time—it just happens to be manifesting in a more explicit way now that we’re sharing authorship of this joint publication. So much of our friendship has been centered on mutual interests in art and literature and we’ve spent many years feeding things back and forth to each other—quotations and excerpts from our readings, photographic works we feel the other person might appreciate, various bits of wisdom and encouragement—as well as offering important feedback on whatever it is we’re in the process of making. We’ve essentially been working together on our separate endeavors, so it seems only natural that those endeavors should eventually coalesce into a shared one. In this specific case, the impetus for that was more from you deciding to let me in on something you had been developing rather than us building something from scratch, so maybe there’s something you could say about that decision to give up some of your autonomy.

I was feeling frustrated with this large pile of photographs that I had accumulated over the years that did not fit into any of my projects (an idea that I believe in less and less these days). For the longest time, I simply could not figure out what to do with these pictures and every attempt I made at an aesthetic or theoretical concept felt like I was taking undeserved shortcuts. I think a lot of photographers/artists are familiar with this, a certain kind of loneliness and the perceived pressure to figure out what our work is about. I was looking for a way to alleviate that somehow, to get away from my own ego and to find a more communal way of making work. I realized that maybe the solution for my particular problem might not come from inside my head, but from outside it (to borrow a phrase from John Cage). And that’s when I approached you.

I had admired an appreciation of the unfinished in your work and thinking, a championing of process over outcome which, along with what you said about our back and forth over the years, made me feel like you would be the right person to ask. You also introduced the idea of the fragment into our discussions, which arguably has informed our book more than any other. Can you say what it is that continues to draw you to the fragmentary?

I think you already nailed it to some extent with the phrase “process over outcome.” Of course there is something satisfying about the finality of something, all the loose ends tied up in a neat little package, but at the same time I struggle to reconcile that sense of completion with wanting to retain something of the process itself, to foreground that aspect in some way. Another friend of mine once said to me how it always seems like I’m working through something rather than on it, which I very much appreciated, because it’s that taking of a subject or a preoccupation, rolling it around for a while and just seeing what clings to it, how it mutates and transforms, that really fulfills me. The result, the end product, is always bound to be something of a disappointment. There’s this wonderful Lydia Davis essay (“Fragmentary or Unfinished”) where she talks about how the fragmentary calls attention to the work “as artifact” rather than whatever it might mean—a breaking of the fourth wall. I feel like there’s something in that that relates to your concern (which I very much share) about the pressure to force a set of pictures into a conceptual framework, when the real desire, that we tend to suppress for any number of reasons, is to somehow ground it in the messy activity of its making. 

Coming back to our book though: the particular notion of the fragmentary that we tried to play off of comes from Walter Benjamin, specifically his monumental (and ultimately unfinished) work the Arcades Project. Perhaps you could say something about your interest in that book (or Benjamin in general) and what relevance it has for our collaboration.

I guess in many ways Benjamin could be considered the patron saint of “working through” something! He has touched on so many subjects in his writing, but always from an unusual and unexpected angle. It was his thinking around the ideas of history and progress that initially got me interested and that had a profound effect on some of my other work.

The Arcades Project is a strange book and much has been written about it. There are some apparent parallels between its motifs and our endeavor—the flâneur, the city, the labyrinth. But it is the way it is assembled, the method of its making, that really fascinated me. Instead of offering up one grand theory, Benjamin sets fragment against fragment, letting the montage of the material speak for itself. As he himself states at one point in the Arcades: “Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall appropriate no ingenious formulations, purloin no valuables. But the rags, the refuse—these I will not describe but put on display.”

Benjamin’s larger goal with the Arcades Project was to find a new way of making sense of history—specifically that of the 19th century, by way of a portrait of the city of Paris. But instead of telling that history, he wanted to show it and to allow the re-assembling of historical waste, the rags as he called them, to produce new and unexpected insights.

I have always been fascinated by this method and wondered if it could be translated to the photographer’s archive as the site of another type of history. Seen that way, our collaboration became a sort of collective rag picking; rummaging through our combined collections of unused and discarded photographs in the hope that their re-assembling could produce something new that had been hidden until then. It was also an attempt at redeeming these photographs, as Benjamin would probably have said, and saving them from falling into oblivion.

Something I have always wondered about with the Arcades Project is, if Benjamin had finished it, how much would he really have “just shown” and how much of his own voice would have remained or snuck back in.
During our time working on this book, similar questions arose a number of times: how much can we actually let the material do the talking and when, as the authors of the book, do we have to take charge and steer it in a certain direction? I think it is the pursuit and creation of meaning I am wondering about, questions I know you have you have also grappled with before.

Throughout so many different areas of thought the consensus regarding human happiness seems to be that it requires some measure of relinquishing the will—the capacity to get out of your own way. It’s an immense struggle, of course, especially when it comes to making any kind of art. As you know, the compositional methods and overarching philosophy of John Cage are very much predicated on this idea, of giving one’s agency over to chance—creating a space or the conditions for things to occur freely and spontaneously rather than forcing the material to conform to your own ideas and concepts. This feels very much like Benjamin’s “I needn’t say anything. Merely show.” With both Benjamin and Cage, there is still the formulation of a structure or a set of parameters, but at the same time the strategy is intended to do away with all the commentary and allow the things—sounds, language, pictures—to speak for themselves. 

Photography’s place in this whole discussion is an interesting one because we are dealing so directly with the material of the real world, so that negotiation between one’s ideas and (referring back to the line of Cage you mentioned) “ideas outside the mind” is so pressing and unavoidable. I think maybe one of the most valuable aspects about working together on this book was that we weren’t able to insist too strongly on our own ideas about things, if only because we’re just not that obstinate of people and we respect each other a great deal. 

As for “the creation and pursuit of meaning,” I feel like I’m increasingly unsure as to the right way to go about that pursuit or, even more importantly, how I would define or understand meaning for myself. (I’m reminded of Joseph Brodsky here: “In the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.”) A novel crammed full of allusions and symbolism means very differently from, say, the “merely show” method of haiku, and I want to believe that things can “mean” on their own accord, through their sheer presence, without my heavy-handed intervention. I know Cage’s 4’33 piece strikes many people as a kind of novelty, but I find it very instructive, again just being indicative of this wonderful balance between structure and spontaneity. There’s a big difference between forcing things into a container of one’s own invention and simply putting a frame around what’s there, which is of course what we do as photographers in the so-called documentary mode. Maybe it’s just a matter of extending that principle to the larger “frame” of the project or the body of work, not only individual images.

Yes, and maybe also to the two stages of working on a photo project such as ours: the actual taking of the photographs (I’m thinking specifically of Zen in the Art of Archery here and the idea of emptying the mind), and then working with the images later on.
Something that has become especially apparent to me with our collaboration is how completely different these two acts are. It probably should not have been that much of a surprise, as every photography student is told over and over again how important it is to detach yourself from your own photographs, but still: I have come away with a new appreciation for editing and sequencing, if only because we essentially skipped the first part for A Narrow Foothold and were able to almost look at our combined photographs as if they had been taken by someone else entirely.
I remember reading somewhere that whenever Francis Ford Coppola worked on a new film, he would lock away the footage he had shot for many months and only attempt to start editing after he had forgotten what the actual experience of filming that footage was like. It is arguably a lot easier to get out of your own way (and quiet the photographer or filmmaker’s ego) when you’re working with material that has been sitting on the shelves for a long time and to which you have lost almost all attachment. Curiously, if we did become attached to a particular photograph during the editing of the book, it was always one of the other’s and not our own!

I love Brodsky’s definition of craft as not accumulating expertise but uncertainties and it has my mind drifting in a million different directions. You and I have spoken about Zen Buddhism a number of times (something that was of course also very important to John Cage) and the concept of the beginner’s mind—this idea that those who consider themselves masters or experts close themselves off from a world of experience and that one should instead embrace compassion and continuous learning. “The real secret of the arts: always be a beginner.” (Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind)

Tim Ingold called this the original idea of the word amateur: those who do things not to master them, but for the love of doing them. This might also be the flip side of what you said earlier about finding meaning: that if you only do the work, meaning will come of its own accord. I am also thinking of Simone Weil here, and her conception of attention as a kind of vigilant waiting. Her idea of attention has implications far beyond our scope here, but I still find it informative for the creative process: “If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension. Without knowing or feeling it, this apparent barren effort has brought more light into the soul.”

Another more mysterious dimension!

I’ll close off this meandering reply by saying that attention seems to also be at the heart of a lot of the photography that moves me personally. It allows me to share in the photographer’s attention to the world and through it, I feel the photographer asking me a simple question: Do you see what I see?

To your first remark about photography’s “two stages” (which I suspect we could probably divide up or multiply even further) I immediately thought of one of Corita Kent’s class rules: “Don't try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.” Rather than viewing photographic practice as a process, it seems to me more like a long chain of very different processes all linked together, and it never ceases to surprise me how each of those segments, particularly all that comes after the actual picture making, requires a very different set of faculties and way of orienting oneself. 

Whenever I teach undergraduate students about editing, sequencing, etc., we always do an exercise working with found images (often film stills) because of how it completely cuts off all the emotional energy that would otherwise be bound up in the initial making. There’s for sure a freedom and a clarity that comes with that which can be really instructive. And here the importance of detachment comes up yet again. It seems we are constantly doing this strange back-and-forth—trying to untether ourselves from our preconceptions when we set out to make pictures, then again when we need to see our own resulting images clearly, all the while trying to go deeper inward. No wonder it’s all so messy and confusing, requiring long stretches of time to let things settle. 

Speaking of beginner’s mind, I have been teaching a foundations photography class here (whereas I have become somewhat accustomed to mid-level courses and workshops with folks who maybe have more experience with the medium) and it has been so refreshing to be focusing exclusively on the fundamentals again. I was showing some of Paul Graham’s projects from the 2000s recently (A Shimmer of Possibility, The Present) which feel very much like an exercise in “beginner’s mind,” a photographer well into his career making work that emphasizes the basic functions of the camera/medium (time, focus, etc.). Attention definitely comes up a lot too, as I try to get students to realize the essential power of what you just described—the fact that a picture allows someone to share in your seeing, and that the more deeply you “attend,” the more that depth of feeling and consciousness enters into the pictures and gets transferred over to the viewer. 

I remember a criticism I received from someone once telling me that my remarks were always really obvious. It’s probably true, but it’s because it’s usually the most obvious, the most basic and fundamental aspects of things that I tend to find the most profound. Photography’s relationship to attention—the attention it both requires and confers—is very much one of those things.

Just yesterday I read philosophy being described somewhere as the art of wondering at the obvious. I wrote this down because it seemed so closely related to photography but also wonderfully on point and somehow too innocent at the same time.

When I was at school, I had a teacher who was supposed to educate us in religious studies. A church-going Christian himself, he would still have none of it. He felt that teaching religion in the way the German school system intended would come close to indoctrination. So, instead, he taught us philosophy. He introduced us to the ancient Greeks, the Stoics, the French existentialists, and many others. He wanted us to be able to think for ourselves and I am still immensely grateful for this early introduction to philosophy and critical thinking.

I don’t think he would have agreed with the above definition of philosophy. He was much more indebted to the dialectical method and might have rather said that philosophy is the art of problematizing the obvious. His way of analyzing was one of scrutinizing the object in a back and forth until he arrived at some sort of satisfactory truth. And while he was very passionate about philosophy, he made it very clear that he saw the real value in something else, namely art. In his eyes, no philosopher ever came close to achieving what our greatest artists have achieved. I don’t remember the exact context, but there was a moment when he said to me that “all philosophers are failed artists.” He said it with such conviction that I did not dare to ask what exactly he meant. Today I believe the answer might have something to do with the difference between those two words, wondering and problematizing, and that he made this strong judgment because really, he was speaking of himself—that maybe he would have liked to problematize less and wonder more. As someone who is likewise always going back and forth between the spirit and the intellect, this feels very familiar. Although I would probably not pitch artist against philosopher, but rather treat these as two points on the spectrum of, well, attending to the world.

Let me make another leap here. I’ve been thinking about dichotomies and paradoxes for a while. I have found that this philosophical method of constructing paradoxes and dichotomies, or thesis and anti-thesis, can be both a blessing and a curse. It can be tremendously helpful to get to the bottom of things but it can also trap you within a cage constructed by language. I think it was Niklas Luhman who said that it is one of language’s particularities that every statement refers to its own counter-statement—that every affirmation correlates to its negation and that whatever you say, you will invite someone to say the opposite.

In a book which I think you had recommended to me, the poet Emily Ogden speaks of her own trouble with the question whether poetry matters or not. “If I say poetry does matter … I have implicitly conceded that there could be two views of the case.” Her saying that poetry matters would invite someone else to say that it doesn’t. Ogden’s way out of this is to keep the question from arising in the first place. And she proposes to do so by making a gesture—that gesture being the celebration of poetry itself.

This might sound a little contrived, so let me bring it back to the world of photography. There’s a Magnum video course by Alec Soth in which he very openly shares how even he is sometimes plagued by doubts about his work and about being a photographer. He goes on to tell how he once asked William Eggleston’s son if his father ever had any such doubts, to which the answer simply was: no, never.

I find that both endearing and interesting. Maybe what it means is that some of us simply have more doubts than others and that some of us have to try a little harder to keep those questions from arising. And that the best thing to do in that case might simply be to go out and photograph or make some art with whatever means you have. I guess it’s another way of saying that you should always try to be a beginner.

This distinction between problematizing (which also presumes solving) and wondering has me thinking about Ludwig Wittgenstein and the difficulty that his executors faced in figuring out to do with the massive amount of written material (his Nachlass) he left behind. There have been many efforts to try and clean up his work and shape it into a more coherent set of ideas, but there’s also the feeling that he never really intended his work to amount to a unified system, and was instead simply trying to provoke his readers into questioning themselves, to show himself working through the problems (thinking on the page) instead of necessarily arriving at any definite conclusions. “Our disease is one of wanting to explain. Man has to awaken to wonder,” he said. 

The poet Mary Ruefle also said something in an interview along the lines of “I’d always rather wonder than know.” Some might see this as an easy way out, more like remaining in ignorance than going through the trouble of finding out the truth, but it’s also much more discomforting because it requires one to live with ambiguities. But that’s the space of the artist, to develop and nurture one’s “negative capabilities.” I don’t think that necessarily means never discovering anything certain, but it’s not the supposed stability of philosophical truths or logic or science. It comes only in flashes. I think it was Aristotle who said that “philosophy begins in wonder.” In any case I think art and photography certainly do, and maybe those who practice it are just more careful about preserving it, of striving to remain always (like you said) a beginner.