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Transcending Meaning

By Matthew Stadler

Photography has been with us for so long, its shapes have settled upon the land, its depths and surfaces have saturated the air—interposed like a mist between ourselves and what we see—that even a child lifting her first plastic camera now shifts position and frames the shot, organizes the world into the parts of a rectangle, as thoughtlessly as if breathing in and breathing out. Photography has become natural. It is older than the woods, the sea, the cities and the farms, because its history has shaped those things and how we see them now.

Faced with this disappearance of photography into the simple realm of being—a world wherein to look is to take a picture—some photographers no longer speak of "taking a picture," but of "making a picture." They construct their work by demoting the camera to a secondary role, a recording instrument for the primary work of "making"— sometimes with an enormous crew of people wielding astonishing resources over a great number of days—a photograph in the world. Gregory Crewdson says of this process, "Making the picture is very different from the final picture. The process," he argues, "is as important as the picture itself."

This approach displaces the site of action away from the camera and into a distant realm of meticulously arranged locations, studio sets, computer software, financial meetings, and bureaucratic negotiations through which the artist moves as a privileged operative and from which he returns with a souvenir, the photograph. The all-too-common fact of a body seeing through a camera is thus bypassed on the way toward the larger social and economic operations by which a culture makes meaning in its photographs.

A skeptic might say of these practices that the photographer has no faith in the camera, but it is more accurate to say that he or she has lost interest in it. A host of forces comes to bear within the surface of a photo, and photographers such as Crewdson, or Jeff Wall, have shifted their interests there.

A second response to the naturalization of photography is to dwell more closely in the phenomenology of a body seeing through a camera. This practice, akin to yoga, isolates and refines the most basic habits of seeing and then—through repetition, presence, and mindfulness—brings consciousness fully into being within the act of photography. The photograph emerges from the body and camera together in the world, a kind of emanation of living, like breath or memory. Here, the camera remains central. The photographs of Ari Marcopoulos, to cite one example, are shaped with such clarity and transparency that one feels no distance between the object and its making. To encounter such a photograph is to witness its making.

The overall effect is essentially the opposite of what Crewdson describes. These are not the secondary documents of an interesting mind. Their pleasures are not voyeuristic. They are, instead, evidence of the marriage of photography and seeing—as brilliant, refined, and masterful as the breathing of a yogic teacher. Photographs of this sort place us in a direct relation with the problems of seeing in the world now, and they interest me a great deal.

Shawn Records, a photographer living in Portland, is this second sort of photographer. He carries two cameras—a Mamiya 7 and a Pentax 6x7, both medium format cameras, one a rangefinder, the other an SLR—and responds to what he sees by using them. His habit is to photograph without much intention; he rarely knows what he is looking for, but he often finds it.

"Untitled"
From the series Beaverton
© Shawn Records
Image Courtesy of the Artist

Records' photographs (far less numerous than Marcopoulos') are refined, evacuated of drama, and rigorously formal. Their formality might appear to belie their origin in what I am characterizing as a yogic practice of photography, but anyone familiar with the great degree of formalization within yogic practice won't find a paradox here. This is essential. This kind of work, especially that of Marcopoulos, is sometimes regarded as an informal record of the course of living, when it is in fact part of a very formalized, even ritualistic practice.

For Records this practice rests in a habit of seeing without much desire. Records does not hunt for the perfect moment of, say, a Cartier-Bresson, but instead scans for landscapes of information stripped of any single organizing drama. I have been with him as he looks out at a chaos of people and buildings and plants and cars (we're working together on a project documenting Portland's suburb of Beaverton, Oregon) and waits until the view contains no center—or multiple centers—in a dispersed field of uniform interest. His talent is to find a view in which every corner and edge is equally active and important and to mark it with a photograph. When he photographs people, they take their place as objects, often peripheral, alongside their brethren plants and televisions. He is able to achieve his astonishing results only by freeing himself and his camera of the compulsion toward meaning.

This is an especially useful tool for research. My own interest (what led me to propose our collaboration on Beaverton) is to discover and communicate the logic and beauty of the oft-derided landscape of sprawl, because it is the landscape of the future. Anyone approaching this landscape with an appetite for meaning will inevitably find images that reproduce the tired drama of sprawl's destruction of nature and the city—that endless tragedy of our assault upon both urbanity and the wild in the form of despised suburbs.

However, because Shawn Records sees by forgetting what he might want or value—or is supposed to produce in the world—he has been uniquely able to find and record the fugitive logic of Beaverton. This practice of emptying out—of creating the empty center through which breath or photographs can move—is an especially productive way to deal with the naturalization of photography.