Evidence, Everywhere

And a life update

I’m often asked about my favorite photographers, and I generally pull names from the list of: Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Stephen Shore, Bill Owens, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, William Eggleston, Mary Ellen Mark, Byron Wolfe, Jerry Hsu, Andrew Hammerand, Michael Lundgren, and of course the actual best, Nadia Sablin.

However, I am generally much more influenced by people’s ideas about photography than I am about actual photographic work. People like Paul Graham (the photographer, not the capitalist), Barbara Ess, Nathan Lyons, Frank Gohlke, Susan Sontag, Joel Eisinger, and Betsy Schneider have explicated thoughts regarding the inherent capacities of photography, and the unique potential therein, that have developed my appreciation for the medium far beyond what any set of pictures ever could.

But, if I were to really consider the single photographic project that has had the greatest influence upon my philosophy of photography (as well as my stylistic sensibilities), it would be the collaborative work of Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan on their project, Evidence (for which neither artist ever created a photograph!).

Evidence’s afterword, written by Robert F. Forth, begins—

“The general semanticist, Alfred Korzybski, liked to point out that a major difference between us and the apes is ‘about a quarter inch of cortex.’ Though there are a few more differences than that, we tend to forget or ignore the unfamiliar and sometimes unrecognizable circumstances which undergird and surround the familiar and evident. Also, there is the case stated by the folk adage: ‘Familiarity breeds contempt,’ and that which is beneath our contempt can also be subversive to our common sense…. ‘Just as a magician performs the miraculous with objects of utter familiarity, such as cards, coins, handkerchiefs and rabbits….’ Surprise, which appears to be the common base of both creative behavior and our response to what is called comedy, is often resurrected out of the familiar by relating the familiar which we have taken for granted to an unfamiliar context; it is this context, the circumstantial, which so often blinds all but the ‘child’ in us each, which is sometimes the sole impulse that allows us to see the evident…”

A synopsis stolen from Google Books (at least I didn’t use ChatGPT?) reads: In 1977, photographers Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel sifted through thousands of photographs in the files of the Bechtel Corporation, the Beverly Hills Police Department, the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, the U.S. Department of the Interior, Stanford Research Institute and a hundred other corporations, American government agencies, and educational, medical and technical institutions. They were looking for photographs that were made and used as transparent documents and purely objective instruments--as evidence, in short. Selecting 50 of the best, they printed these images with the care you would expect to find in a high-quality art photography book, publishing them in a simple, limited-edition volume titled Evidence.

What I like about this project is that it elucidates the brilliance that is conceived by photography itself. The fact that the artists did not produce any photographs of their own in order to convey a predetermined idea demonstrates photography’s innate ability to confer meaning through discovery. All of the pictures in Evidence were created free from preconception of Mandel and Sultan’s eventual recontextualization of them.

As Nathan Lyons wrote in 1960, “What it is that we ‘understand’ is not a question of original idea, but discovery. Understanding exists, it must be found.” And, “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.”

Photography is constantly asked to ascend to something “greater” than its most primal form. Photography is demanded to provide documentation, to provide illustration, to provide beauty, to provide journalism, to provide propaganda, to provide marketing, to provide algorithm fodder, to provide representation.

Each of these things is in fact important (eh, sans the algorithm chum), and it is a testament to the versatility of photography that it is able to fulfill all of these demands! Yet when the entire photography community is expected to pursue these side quests, we ultimately abandon photography’s most central and powerful provision: wormholes through space-time that teleport us to a metaphysical place built by memory, conjecture, feelings, and ideas, in which our sensors of understanding become tuned to receive signals of meaning. It sounds like I’m joking, but photographs from the real world can trigger psychedelic connections to clues about the fundamental truth of existence, if you, you know, look at them just right.

Too many photographers believe that they must first develop a thesis about the nature of things, then go out into the world as they imagine it to be, and then forcefully manufacture images that support their thesis. And often, their thesis sucks in the first place. It is much better to go out into the world as it actually is, equipped with a hypothesis, and shoot enough pictures injudiciously that you inevitably capture a visual dialogue happening between the photographs, and then, as they speak to each other, you might be able to hear what they are revealing about the true nature of things.

The title of the book is a witty equivoque: The name is not only a reference to the original context in which the photographs were made; Evidence is about listening to what the photographs can tell us.

Forth concludes his afterword with—

“We may well find ourselves sharing the plaintive questioning in this little rime:

‘And how am I to face the odds

Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?

I, a stranger and afraid

In a world I never made.’

“With that, Ashley Montagu ended his book, The Humanization of Man. Anthropologist Montagu’s answer to the question about simply facing the odds, much less beating them, was: rejoin the whole-Earth human race—all of it you can. Regain your heart by renewing curiosity about and tolerance of the nature of things in general, that circumstantial which underpins and surrounds the evident State As Things.”

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As many of my readers already know, this year I decided to answer a beckoning that has for years been calling me to leave my hometown of Phoenix. Based upon a swirling, intoxicating, amorphous cloud of decision making I have put my comfortable house up for sale as a means of moving to New York City in hopes of finally locating what has been calling. Much to my bewilderment, many have congratulated me on following through with this life-changing decision and the concomitant Herculean effort. For what do I deserve congratulations? I am just a man who is acting out of desperation in an effort to finally chase down a meaningful existence before my time on this planet expires.

Then, as it often happens, a stranger befriended me at a pivotal moment. Before our conversation ever wandered into discussing my current endeavor, he shared an artist statement he once wrote about a watercolor painting he made as an undergrad student:

“Stagnant

Stag-nant:

Adjective: (of a body of water or the atmosphere of a confined space) having no current or flow and often having an unpleasant smell as a consequence: a stagnant ditch - figurative showing no activity; dull and sluggish.

‘It’s like you’d rather sit and think about your stagnancy than actually getting up and changing it.’ It’s true, all of these things I am responsible for - or even crave - require my attention and effort. Yet, for some reason, the motivation just isn’t there. The power I need to light these matches to create the fire that I need to keep going… eludes me.

I dwell so deeply in my past. Things I waited so patiently for will never happen. People I’ve lost will not come back nor be the same if I try to reconstruct what I should probably just let go.

Letting go. That’s the one thing in my life I’ve never been very good at. I’m afraid of the change I desperately need. The rosey-pink charm of my childhood is starting to rot. The glass bottles taunt me and haunt you. Fake flowers never die, but they have no scent. These shoes remind of places I’ve seen and people I’ve been. They only require a simple decision: lace them up and leave your room, or throw them away and start fresh? I can change everything, I know I can. I just have to find that spark.”

So maybe drastic change does deserve congratulations. Maybe there is something special about working tirelessly to stay ahead of stagnation—to recontextualize one’s circumstances and continue to outrun the predatory and contempt-breeding familiarity that blinds us to the childlike wonder of all that undergirds the otherwise evident.

My best friend reached out to ask how things are going so far. I replied, “Honestly it’s hard to say how it’s going. Obviously, at one point I planned to come out here expecting to find a good paying job and start a family. Then I pivoted to just wanting to find some professional photography work and try to build enough of a client base to be able to support myself and live in a better city than Phoenix. Now I feel myself transitioning to just wanting to do my own photography and writing until my time/money runs out. Just pure photographic pursuits that may never amount to anything, but at least I will have seized this rare opportunity to briefly live the way that I would when nothing else matters.”

So I’m out here for liberation. For freedom from the familiar. To face the odds and try to regain my heart by renewing curiosity about and tolerance of the nature of things.

I have a hypothesis that all this shit we endure in life matters, that there is meaning to be discovered through all of it. And I’m here, with my camera, to sift through the shit and collect the evidence.