Capital P Photography

Thoughts on Nathan Lyons's "Comment"

Countless hours have been spent amongst photographers debating what photography is and what it is not. Such discussions range from enticing challenges that provoke new perspectives and ideas about the different functions of pictures, to miasmatic and superficial litigations about the various methods of picture making. 

The Phoenix Suns’ star shooting guard, Devin Booker, has been referred to as a “sicko” by some of basketball’s top strategic thinkers, due to the extent that Booker obsesses over the game. Accordingly, Booker once tweeted, “Can’t talk basketball with everybody.”

I tend to apply Booker’s boundaries to photography, and try to limit my participation in “what is photography really” discussions to people who I can verify are not suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect, and therefore won’t trigger my outrage by saying something ignorant like “I’m a purist, I only shoot film and never edit my photos,” as if those limitations somehow confer legitimacy. 

As opposed to an elitist, I consider myself a photography sicko, and I am thus scant in my willingness to discuss the topic with people who have not already tortured themselves with Talmudic interrogation of their own opinions. As a result, I generally only have in-depth photography discussions with people whose considerations I truly value. And while I admire these photographers’ insights, I rarely hear anyone express an appreciation for photography that mirrors my own.

That is why, I think, I love the short essay by Nathan Lyons called “Comment” from the book and accompanying exhibition, “Under the Sun: The Abstract Art of Camera Vision, 1960.” This writing served as Lyons’s first formal statement about his photography. I say “I think” because in some instances I find it hard to be confident that I am smart enough to understand what Lyons is trying to say. But I’m pretty sure I agree with most of it.

In my first Substack post, I wrote about my evolving lifelong relationship with photography. In my second post, I used a David Foster Wallace speech to describe the underlying appreciation for photography that has been the through line of that evolution—an obsession with using photography as a way to explore, understand, and appreciate the human experience.

The following is Lyon’s “Comment” in full (italicized), supplemented with my editorial notes in brackets, following each section I am editorializing.

The essential property of an image is that it is the fusion of intellect and emotion into a single reality. Intellect, as an isolated consideration, with an unrelated concern for the interaction of our senses, represents a brittle human state. The weight of too much thought has a way of disturbing, not only the balance of the individual, but any concurrent objectification. A similar condition may arise as the result of disassociated physical concerns. 

[What I believe Lyons is addressing here is similar to something I wrote about in my David Foster Wallace piece regarding the competing interests of aesthetic and intellect. Most fledgling photographers begin with wanting to capture or create beauty. Then, those who push themselves further mature into messengers with ambitions of conveying thoughts about the world. However, when we over-prioritize either function when making a picture, we fail to achieve photography’s full potential as a medium, which only materializes when we balance these forces, mixing the ingredients of a thought into a visual response to the world.]

I do not think that it is a question of man’s frustration in terms of “absolutes,” but rather, what is important, is the degree of significance in his “point of departure.” Degree is the condition of time past, present, and future. It is also the condition of man. What it is that we “understand” is not a question of original idea, but discovery. 

[I really appreciate this distinction that understanding comes from discovery rather than intrinsic manifestation. I recently found a note that I wrote to myself during a 2005 psychedelic experience that read, “Drugs open blinds; windows are present, regardless” (concision is imperative when trying to steal from behind the curtain and smuggle enlightenment back into your Truman Show). The epiphany that I was trying to preserve was the realization that understanding is always around us, but without intervention we are usually disabled from accessing it. In his book “The Creative Act,” Rick Rubin describes our creative minds as being equipped with antennae that enable us to tune-in to ideas as they float around us, seeking conduits to bring them to life.]

Understanding exists, it must be found. Once recognized (always in terms of degree), its primary characteristics can be recorded. The generative property inherent within interacting moments of understanding is the imaginative literature of the mind. The affirmation of imaginative association is the expression of Art. Art is an expression of knowledge.

[This is how photography can serve as an intervention that grants us access to windows of understanding. It provides us an ability to interface between the physical and metaphysical domains. We use cameras like antennae in an attempt to capture understanding from the ether in the same way that a lightning rod is used to bait electrostatic discharges from the atmosphere.]

In the literature of the mind, imagination can become just a word. The presence and structure of imaginative relationship is only the occurrence of a point-of-entry for experience. There must be an active juxtaposition of mind and the physical world to affirm, challenge, or refute what is taken to be understanding. By sifting feelings through the strainer of intellect we may grow to understand the thought of significant experience which remains. I believe in the knowledge that my senses supply my being and therefore, the virtual states inherent in the photographic situation enrich and challenge my understanding of life.

[First of all, “sifting feelings through the strainer of intellect” is a brilliant metaphor. Secondly, this is the part that gives me affirmation. Specifically, “I believe in the knowledge that my senses supply my being and therefore, the virtual states inherent in the photographic situation enrich and challenge my understanding of life.” This is Polaris in my navigation through conversations about what photography is and what it is not. Photographer and former Curator of Twentieth Century Photography at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House (and friend of Nathan Lyons), William Jenkins, once explained to me that as soon as a picture serves any other purpose, it is no longer capital P Photography. Pictures that are used to supplement an article are illustrations, pictures used to sell a product are advertisements, pictures that promote an agenda are propaganda, etc. Only pictures that are made for the sake of making pictures are Photography. But what is the sake of making pictures?]

Photography is, when used with regard for its inherent directness, a unique and exacting means of isolating inner realities found in correspondence with the physical world. This is an important distinction; for the employment of camera vision to an area which is commonly labeled “unidentifiable” or “abstract” is a misnomer. All photography which reveals existing states of matter is the result of abstraction. The essence or effect of a subject-matter-situation is transferred to a two-dimensional surface. It is not the “thing in itself” recorded but a fixed representation of it. Unidentifiable as the “subject matter” may seem, in terms of “real” associations, it does exist in the context of the physical world. It is here that it has been discovered, felt, and recorded. The photographic process not only records preoccupation in the exercise of plastic or creative sensibility, but the photograph may become an awakener of our sensibilities.

[There it is. That’s the sake of making pictures. To experiment with what it is like to engage with a visual world and respond in kind, and as a result of that experimentation, to develop new understanding of, and appreciation for, life. That is capital P Photography.]

The visual experiences which I have included in this edition, are in no way fictitious. They are affirmations of imaginative preoccupation. In a world composed of images, they point to the significance of vision as a primary sense of selective observation. The correlations between the camera and the functions of the eye have been repeatedly alluded to, but primarily in terms of mechanistic functions. There is however, another area for consideration: the eye and the camera see more than the mind knows.

[For me, as I believe it was for Nathan Lyons, Photography is a process of augmenting and expanding our consciousness through the practice of training our attention. It is a meditation.]