PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE BEAUTIFICATION OF IMPERMANENCE
"All composed things are like a dream,
illusions, bubbles, shadows, dew, a flash of lightning.
That is how to contemplate and observe them."
The Vajracchedika Prajnaparamita Sutra
I remember when I was a very young man looking at the picture on the back cover of the album Late For The Sky by Jackson Browne and seeing an older young man whom I admired. Now when I look at that same image, although he is still the same number of years older, I see a younger man than myself. There is something in the experience of this delay, this echo, which sort of sums up the strangeness of photography, and how the meaning of a picture comes as much from me or you, and the dynamic context, as it does the photo. The photographic displacement of time endures even within the complete awareness of the present moment. The process of writing this essay has helped to clarify my thoughts concerning the beautification of impermanence in modernist, postmodernist, and contemporary photographic practice, as well as its relationship to the Japanese wabi-sabi aesthetic. Firstly, I will look at assumptions regarding what art is, particularly for a contemporary artist and Buddhist who doesn't necessarily paint Buddhas. It is beyond the scope of this short essay to extract the symbiotic exchanges between the practices of art and Buddhism. However, the relevance of contemplating impermanence within the Buddhist path shall be examined at length.
Humans think dualistically, therefore it should not be surprising that ideas about what art is often contradict. Consider these discursive pairings:
art as beauty of natural form / art as beauty of idea
art as communication / art as authentic presence
art as connection to a higher power / art as an impersonal cultural discourse
art as expression / art as freedom from expression
art is a tool for exploration / art as a hammer
art as a mirror / art as a window
art as a question / art as an answer
art as a vehicle for discovery / art as fabrication
art as the practice towards unification or transcendence of opposites /
art as a double illusion
At its worst art is mere self-aggrandizement. At its best, art is an offering. My daughter says: "art is like skipping around". In Latin the word for art is "ars," meaning "to put everything in its place." Politically, art is anything that takes place in an art gallery or designated art event out in the world, governed by the explicit or implicit affirmation and approval of the art community. It seems to me that much of life's suffering is due to the gap between the way things are vs. the way we have all at one time imagined things ought to be by this point in our lives. Art is a practice that addresses that gap. A genuine spiritual path is whatever goes beyond complaining about suffering to actually dealing with it and transcending it, letting it go. If either art or spiritual practice becomes yet another source of suffering, then one is living in the theater of the absurd.
Whenever we view a picture three things are necessary: a picture, a context, and an observer. Formalism essentializes the image and heroifies the artist. Subjectivism essentializes the observer and mystifies the artist. Postmodernism essentializes culture and, in theory, deflates the notion of the artist as an original genius. We must beware not to get caught by essentialization or reification (the solidification of desiring things to be what they are not). Provisional meaning is generated out of the transitory triangulation of image, culture, and observer in interdependence. We may say these approaches are true for the individual viewer, but not necessarily universally true. An indefinite meaning invariably emerges from the intersection. I want to look at the evolution of the picturing of impermanence in photography and its relationship to beauty through its various changes over the past seventy years or so. This endeavor entails touching on how developments in the understanding of photography as art, and its place as a discourse within a broader art discourse has altered considerably. In other words, not only have the pictures changed, but the change has happened in anything but a cultural vacuum. Within that my own awareness and interests have changed over time too. I am fully aware that the beautification of impermanence in photography has often been less the subject than the background of a lot of work done for a great many divergent reasons. Yet photography is a very democratic medium insofar as everything in a picture is equally there, and like it or not impermanence is up for consideration as a signifier of meaning whenever it is explicitly visible. A photographer can employ techniques to emphasize one thing over another, yet incidental details can have an unpredictable potency.
Historically, modernist photography sought, like every other medium, to distinguish itself within the community of contemporary art. In the early twentieth century there was much debate about what photography could do that the other arts couldn't do as well. One camp asserted that sharpness and the direct relatedness to that which was pictured was the essential characteristic of photography. Another camp claimed that the essence of photography was to mark with light. Although the latter argument was correct, the sharp shooters, backed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York won the battle. That, however, is another story. What concerns us here is photography's world-relatedness. Photographers used maximum depth-of-field to generate pictures with corner to corner sharpness, thereby amplifying the cameras capacity to record detail. Photography was emerging from a long era of derivative, impressionist, fuzzy pictures, which could not be confused as anything but aesthetic in their uselessness as documents. Unlike the slick, progress obsessed, rational and everlasting manifesto-ridden domain of modernist architecture, modernist photography was captivated by the rustic. Edward Weston, Frederick Sommer, Minor White, Aaron Siskind and others, each in their own way found poetry within luminous decay. In so doing their works give visual pleasure, and pass through that emotion to a deeper truth. Weston in particular sought to reveal nature, to let it speak through him, mediated only by technical mastery. Visionary agendas like this were not uncommon, but at their root I suspect they simply intended to imply that in order to make a picture that suggests the sublime, the ego has to get out of the way. Technical mastery has to be second nature to allow this possibility. However, what many of these artists failed to fully recognize is that art is always conditioned by cultural phenomena and personal perception. Although after many years of discipline the process of making pictures may come naturally, it still remains that the meaning of the picture is not entirely in the picture.
Decaying phenomena exhibit striking texture when grazed by a rising or descending sun on the horizon. This "golden hour" as photographers often call it, makes for visually seductive photographs that celebrate light and praise shadows. Edward Weston’s Dead Man and Frederick Sommer’s Chicken Head are just as much about photography and light as they are about death. On the other end of the continent Walker Evans photographed both urban and rural ruin, using his images like a sly literary device. He wasn't interested in nostalgia, nor in beauty as an end in itself. Meanwhile, based in Chicago Aaron Siskind made intensely austere photographs of peeling posters that shared many visual characteristics of the abstract expressionist paintings of his friend William de Kooning. He wasn't interested in social commentary, although he emerged from that background. Rather, his images invite reverie in the luminous muck of the ordinary.
For a number of years I have been operating as an artist under the assumption that something is beautiful in proportion to its degree of ephemerality. I'm not sure where I got that idea, but it has endured as a returning point. Strange that ephemerality should be enduring. In our culture beauty is often portrayed as disposable consumables, or as a vista point in the landscape of ersatz experience. Of course, beauty exists in opposition to ugliness as a perpetuating dichotomy. What is ugliness in Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast but the illusory spell of false appearances? Beauty is often interchangeable with purity and innocence, such as in fairy tales like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty. Women are beautiful, whereas men are handsome. Concepts of beauty run deep in cultural mythology, yet the truly beautiful moments I remember the best always arrived without contrivance or anticipation. They were always just ordinary moments, just absurd things like rösti at the train station in Zürich, or standing on a small bridge in the Elfenau and realizing half my life was over, or reading Calvino for the first time. It would be too easy to say that beauty is the absence of ugliness. The beautification of impermanence is often a mingling of the beautiful and ugly, the conditioned and the sublime. You can't teach someone a formula for beauty.
Since the Renaissance ruins in painting have been perceived as aesthetic objects charged with the mystique of history and myth. Painting a ruin, real or imagined, was the kind of stuff that got you accepted as a serious artist. In The Romance Industry John Gossage tells an interesting tale:
"There is a story, purveyed as historical fact, that in 1762 Canaletto the great painter of Venetian scenes having been passed over for admission to the Venice Academy, decided to paint a work that would be more acceptable to the nominating committee. Instead of the documentary views for which he had become known he chose the theme of 'Imaginary Ruins' that was then popular among his contemporaries. The painting entitled 'Architectural Fantasy' deviated little from his previous visual style, but apparently the change of connotation, the setting of the painting in the past, was enough to convince the Academy of Canaletto's artistic merit. He was then admitted to the organization's priviledged ranks in 1763".
The reality of ruins and how they came to be that way is far less noble. Today there are historical sites like the World War II Japanese relocation camp Manzanar that are being reconstructed as public memorials of social injustice. Hopefully it won't become just another roadside attraction. In Whispered Silences Joan Myers lyrically recorded the stones and shards that remained of the relocation camps. Perhaps we preserve ruins today through photography as a way to quietly remember our forgetting. As a photographer and teacher I ask both myself and my students: "What do you want to preserve? Is it possible?"
As objects, photographs also decay. Art photographers or photo-based artists must decide, along with our galleries, if we should endeavor to preserve our pictures by printing and storing them archivally for future generations. Alternatively, we have the choice to accept that not all pictures need to endure. As a photographer who goes out of my way to get archival quality, I sometimes have to admit to the futility of that expensive and time-consuming enterprise. Another voice within me says to be careful and caring with craft, so as to make the work available to others down the line whom I will never know. To preserve a Weston of a charred car: is that being responsible or strange? Insofar as photography is unconcerned with its own longevity it distances itself from the marketplace and begins to resemble other forms of art such as performance and installation that embrace the dematerialization of the art object. Ironically, sometimes a set of photographs is all that remains of certain art events. Artists like Andy Goldsworthy have skillfully used photography to document their ephemeral earthworks. We live in a time of colliding and overlapping art discourses within which the photograph as image / artifact and the photograph as evidence / record play different roles. Also, the context for much art viewing is often galleries carved out of abandoned industrial spaces. This phenomena is very common in Europe. Two good local examples are the Brewery Project in Los Angeles and Bergamot Station in Santa Monica.
Change and openness inevitably grace the melancholy vastness of every passing present moment and the unimaginable future it greets. Sometimes we take pictures to hold that which is endearing and passing out of existence. Photographs remind us of the way things were, not necessarily as a sentimental journey, but as a reminder that those things aren’t that way any more. We also take pictures of decaying phenomena beyond redemption. The beautification of impermanence in modernist photography has suffered by imitation. Today, sentimental and cliche ghost town photographs are standard features in trite and technical popular photography magazines. Picturing impermanence has also suffered by the vicissitudes of the art world. The modernist paradigm took itself too seriously and refused to acknowledge that photographs are constructions; that they can lie as easily as they can reveal. Furthermore, we were seldom informed through pictures of ghost towns that the cause of their empty existence was almost always some combination of the exhaustion of geologic exploitation, economic misfortune, and political stupidity. Two good contemporary examples that do inform us are Steve Fitche's Gone: Photographs of Abandonment on the High Plains, and Robert Polidori's Zones of Exclusion: Pripyat and Chernobyl, both published in 2003. Scrawled on the chalkboard in the abandoned classroom depicted on the cover of Polidori's series are the words: "There's no return. Farewell. Pripyat, 28 April, 1986." Polidori put himself in harms way to ask a fundamental question: "Does any generation have the right to risk the safety of so many future generations? It is my belief that this is the fundamental moral question raised by the disaster. I felt personally compelled to confront and witness this ongoing tragedy that no ritual can heal."
Postmodernism, which arose out of a coalition of theories including Marxist criticism, semiotics, feminism, and psychoanalysis, strongly opposed the production of pretty pictures for their own sake, and regarded them as little more than fetishes. The anti-aesthetic opposed the status quo of an elitist, market-driven, and hopelessly corrupt art world. Take, for example, Allan Sekula's Fish Story, an excellent example of Marxist realism at its most sincere and scholarly. Tucked within the pages of Sekula's scathing and informative text heavy discourse we find many visually seductive pictures of phenomena in decay, metonymns of industry in decline as the fallout of capitalism's failure. In other words, beauty for beauty's sake is avoided in favor of beauty in the service of social criticism. Most often, however, beauty in postmodernism was just damned. It had become equated with an antiquated notion of photographic truth, the alleged irrelevance of an artist's originality, and the insignificance of hand facture and excellence of the fine print. After conceptual art, with the decline of the silver boom and the rise of theory, the focus on art photography lost much support only shortly after it had won the battle to get into museums side by side with unmistakable art. As refreshing as the postmodern critique of beauty was, too broad to repeat here, the situation was never so clearly black or white. The art world has been very pluralistic since at the very latest the 1970's and continues to be so. However, it is safe to say that in the critical eye, from the mid 1980's to the mid 1990's the practice of making beautiful images just wasn't spunky enough to cut it. Neither the picturing of beauty nor decay are theoretically rigorous projects. Through such narrowing one might make the claim that the focus on the beauty of decay in art photography was merely a historical footnote. Such an assertion only holds up to analysis if one ignores the work of many contemporary photographer-artists who did not fall prey to the utopian idealism of modernism, yet also did not conform neatly with postmodern agendas. In the 1970's and 80's work by John Divola, Lewis Baltz, William Christianberry, Richard Misrach, Nicholas Nixon, Seichi Furuya and many others dealt considerably with impermanence as thematic content. More recently we have seen a host of new photography books resplendent in divergence that in one way or another circumambulate this topic, such as Haikyo Hyoru (Ruins) by Shinichiro Koyashi, as well as Andrew Moore's Inside Havana, Joel Sternfield's Walking The High Line, Anthony Hernandez's Pictures For Rome, Miyako Ishiuchi's Time Textured in Monochrome, Steve Brouws' Readymades, plus the half-dozen titles already mentioned.
Impermanence transcends style. It is the death of all fashion. Everything changes, even the slow yellowing of photographs. In reality "things fall apart." We spend most of our lives denying this truth. Curiously, much art photography closely resembles the Japanese wabi-sabi Zen aesthetic that finds beauty in visually rich decay. In Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers Leonard Koren writes:
"Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.
It is a beauty of things modest and humble.
It is a beauty of things unconventional."
The wabi-sabi aesthetic was a skillful rejoinder to the importation of Chinese ornate elitism into Japan long ago. Its origin dates back to the tea ceremony and its founder Rikkyu, who both embodied and was inspired by the Buddhist principle of humility and non-attachment. Unfortunately, both modernism and wabi-sabi have lost their raw freshness through institutionalization. However, impermanence continues to transcend style, and things imperfect and incomplete continue to occupy the vision of many artists precisely because that's the way things are.
Everything that comes together eventually goes apart. Everything born will die. All conditioned phenomena are subject to change as the conditions alter. Impermanence is neither intrinsically good nor bad; it's just undeniable. If we were all fixed solid entities we could not interact with anything, we could not grow from a child to an adult, we could not watch the seed mature to fruit as the flowers wither. The emptiness of an intrinsic self and the space of change are not anything separate. Recognizing this is a kind of awakening. It is not morbid to focus on impermanence. Sometimes new growth depends on decomposition.
The strange thing to come to terms with, however, is the beautification of impermanence. If what we take to be reality is a kind of illusion, fueled by reification - the taking of appearances to be true, solid, and undying - then the fixed and exquisitely rendered representation of that phenomena in thousands of handsome silvery tones or saturated colors is a double illusion. My root teacher H.H. Shenphen Dawa Rinpoche once said:
"When we talk about death we have to stop beautifying, being poetic about death, but not understanding the really true nature of death; we have to face death. We have to look at the reality face to face. There is no use to cover that reality and create another double illusion of reality."
I was troubled by his statement , and few days later asked Rinpoche what he meant by not being poetic about impermanence. Photographers have everything at their disposal to focus on, and everything is in a constant state of flux, no matter how subtle. I thought to myself that if everything is impermanent, how could it be possible to make photographs that didn't beautify unless one decidedly made ugly photographs? That too would be just as bad, in that one would be caught by aversion instead of attraction. I told him that we are constantly being exposed to superficial media, and commented that when a poem or a photograph addresses impermanence it can be a helpful reminder of the truth of conditioned phenomena, a quiet balm in a world of spectacle. However, before I could even finish he explained that, of course there isn't anything wrong with poetry about impermanence, but rather being false - making impermanence seem pretty. I had to think of Hallmark sympathy cards. Soft-focus flowers, trees, candles, and mountains in the mist are the usual subject matter. They are like desserts with too much sugar; like elevator Musak.
Thoughts of impermanence do not give pleasure, but rather confront us head on with how we have so often wasted our time with trivial pursuits and continue to do so. In other words, the contemplation of impermanence is intended to inspire the practice of meditation. Tibetan Buddhism is not some vague wishy-washy new age affair. In what are commonly known as preliminary practices, the thought of impermanence is preceded by thinking intensely about how difficult it is to become born a human being, come into contact with a qualified teacher and authentic teachings, and have the time and opportunity to put them into practice. In Buddhism even the universe is considered impermanent, not to mention the beings and phenomena that live within it. Everything you can picture, as well as the picture itself shall eventually perish. No power, political or spiritual, can stop this. Intense awareness about the certainty of death and the uncertainty of the circumstances of death are positive reminders that keep one awake and grateful for the gift of life. After contemplating those thoughts for awhile one moves on to consider that you can’t take anything with you except your karma, like an inherent shadow foreboding the unripened consequences of one’s positive and negative actions which propel your consciousness to the next life. Lastly, one realizes that wherever one is blown by the winds of karma you are still caught in the round of cyclic existence known as samsara, which is endless dissatisfaction. These "four thoughts which reverse the mind" motivate the taking of refuge in our very own undomesticated and unborn mind. Only that which is unborn can not die.
Snapshots and pictures of peeling paint and the like don’t really touch that, but they can still serve as a reminder of the fleeting moment. They can offer a brief repose within which to appreciate the previously unseen ordinary details of life that have been right in front of our noses all the while. Photographs can also distract us from such moments, and make us want to go shopping.
Everything that has come into existence will sooner or later cease to exist. Photographers of all sorts, including amateurs, professionals, and artists have on occasion sought to hold what is passing. Photographs make us think, feel, believe, question, imagine, detect, remember and forget. I remember throwing away a pile of snapshots of an old girlfriend. Regrettably, I only kept the one’s where she was smiling. Photographs are sometimes magical because in a split second they can shift from acknowledging to denying loss. The subject is gone, yet remains.