Say Hello To Zinnie

I stand accused of this blog being too geeky. I stand, and I find myself guilty. What to do? Make it geekier (yes that is a real word) of course! Although I don’t think geeky is the correct word. For example I would accuse pixel peeping with discussions of lines per millimetre resolving power and Bayer matrix interpolation as geeky as they have very little to do with the actual act of taking or making an image, and revolve purely around the technical. I do however get the point – and choose to ignore it. The thing is that this previously mentioned pixel peeping is so rife across the internet that there exists an imbalance of items on the actual important aspects of photography, the images. Shock. I am feeling the pressure of nature’s desire for balance.

The thing is that there are some fairly plain and indisputable facts when it comes to the technology behind image construction, which makes it a lot more objective and definable. Of course there is still room for point of view and personal preference, but within much tighter boundaries. The actual product, the images themselves do not live within these boundaries, and their appeal lies purely in the viewer’s conscience.

If you look at photographs as much as I do, you would soon become bored with the obvious, the unchallenging. As many of my previous posts indicate, your average everyday photograph, no matter how pleasant or well executed it is, provides little interest beyond a two second glance. There is rarely any opportunity to spend more time with the image, and delve beyond face value, as face value is mostly all there is. The thing is that the majority of people from the same culture will all agree that a good landscape is a pleasant image and that is fine, a great deal of my images are landscapes (arguably good), but even though I enjoy taking those images, I don’t really enjoy looking at other peoples. Self-centred? Maybe.

I am not the first either, nor probably even the millionth, to find this dissatisfaction with the obvious in photography. The issue is: where do you go to find satisfaction. A number of photographers and critics through time have reached the conclusion that there is nothing left to be photographed. A prime example of this would be Sherry Levine who believes that original photographic subjects have been exhausted and she expresses this by photographing other people’s photographs. Thankfully I have not reached that point yet, although I can certainly pass by 90% of the photographs I see.

So what is my point? Well, it is in some way to justify what I write here. I am interested in finding photographs that do ask some questions or provide something deeper than aesthetic consumption, and this is a deep and purely subjective subject. Posting it here provides me a way to further explore how I myself see, and what I get from, photographs, and also provides this insight to my thoughts to anyone who may stumble across the blog. If anyone ever reads this and finds them self looking at a photograph to see if they see what I see in it, or to ask themselves what they see that is different, then this blog has succeeded on another level.

Alright, you say, but what the hell has the image posted got to do with it, and who is Zinnie?

Actually, I have no idea who Zinnie is. The photograph at top is a pre-packed seeded pot, and I can only assume that the flower that may or may not be produced from the seed inside is called Zinnie. Zinnie is my new project…

In the 1950’s a writer named Italo Calvino wrote about a fictional photographer called Antonino Paraggi in an essay titled “The Adventures of a Photographer”. The essay deals with Antonino’s grappling with the essence of how we should photograph, and his distance from the conventional thinking that initially prevented him from taking photographs through to his obsession with single subjects and finally to where he believes he finds the true nature of his photographic desires. A number of Antonino’s feelings on photography have been borne out by real life photographers and have been cited by high profile theorists, and it is these overlaps which interest me. I think the beauty of Antonino being fictional is that his thoughts can be expressed truthfully, whereas many living (and even more, dead) photographers we can only guess at their state of mind through their images. Maybe “guess” isn’t the right word, and I expect that critical theorists (that’s art critics/philosophers to me an you) would rather I did not use the word to summarise their analysis.

Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, among others, believed that all photographs suggest death, to a greater or lesser degree. It sounds a little absurd initially, but there is truth in them words. In addition to this, nearly every writer on photography agrees that there is also a lot of possession involved in photography. (It is the primary reason/motive behind advertising images.) I expect that right now you really don’t agree with me, or more accurately them, so hopefully to bring us a little more in line I want to quote from Calvino’s essay about his fictional photographer Antonino:-

“The minute you start saying something, ‘Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!’ you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost…”

The reaction is quite common, but rarely do we think about the psychological motive behind it. This relates both to possession and death or certainly non-existence.

The problem is that if one strays too far into this realm, problems can arise. Antonino continues, “…as if it never existed, and that therefore, in order to really live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity, the second to madness”.

Ironically, Antonino later “became obsessed with a completely empty corner of the room, containing a radiator pipe and nothing else: he was tempted to go on photographing that spot and only that till the end of his days.”

OK, so Antonino was a fictional character, but consider that between 1978 when Garry Winogrand moved to Los Angeles and his death in 1984 it was discovered he shot over a third of a million photographs that he never looked at. After his death over 2500 rolls of exposed but un-developed film were discovered, in addition 6500 rolls were developed but no contact sheets had been made and a further 3000 rolls had been contacted printed, but not even marked for any selections.

To the point, I will get. The essence of this is that to really photograph something completely, you need to photograph it continuously. Now seeing as I have yet to sink to the madness Antonino describes I don’t really want to go to the extremes where he says, “…the only coherent way to act is to snap at least one picture a minute”; but I would like to experiment with documenting an entire existence. The solution is to document something where the time intervals are less demanding – hence Zinnie.

Of course, I am only covering part of it here – as to do it fully I would have to photograph at all angles, but it will be an interesting exercise none the less (subjectively ;-)). Starting from today, I will take one photo of Zinnie each day, as hopefully the seed germinates and produces something – although with my history of growing things it maybe a single blog entry!

I have no idea what this thing will look like, if it ever shows itself at all. And the one thing that you can be sure of, no matter how beautiful a flower Zinnie turns out to be, it will die. I will make sure of that. The real worrying thing is that if Zinnie does flower, I will be adding yet more flower photographs to the internet. But I can rest assured that the pixel peepers will have little interest, I will be shooting the images with the blog cam – nothing to see here, peepers.

nimbyref:200906a Photo: Zinnie, wrapped, dormant…, nimby. Canon A620.:endnimby