Quotations

• Paul Caponigro :
  I work to attain a ‘state of heart’, a gentle space , offering inspirational substance that could purify ones vision. Photography, like music, must be born in the unmanifest world of spirit.
  For me, intellectual manipulations, forced combining of elements in the name of design, even the best arrangements of the mind are of limited valued in this realm of beauty. I strive to undo my reactions to civilization’s syncopated demands and hope that inner space, quiet, and lack of concern for specific results may enable a stance of gratitude and balance - a receptiveness that will allow the participation of grace. This meditative form of inaction has been my true realm of creative action. A dynamic and vital seeing is my aim. I do not necessarily visualize complete images, but rather my intent is to sense an emotional shape or grasp some inner visitations. 
  Achieve the mystery of stillness, and you can experience a dynamic interaction with the life force that goes far beyond intellectual thought and touches the deepest wells of existence.
  I am most grateful for the discovery and conviction that the real working is internal. Calm and inner stillness are for me essential companions to the activity of my craft.

 

• LL: Re project Newhaven, East Sussex
  Allan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity:
  I have always been fascinated by the law of reversed effort. I also call it the ‘backward’s law’. When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float. When you hold your breath you lose it - which immediately calls to mind an ancient and much neglected saying, ‘Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it’.

 

• John Allen West, The Serpent in the Sky:
  The aim of all human existence is the return to the source. This is the message of Egypt, and of all other initiatic teachings. We are here, according to these teachings, to work to regain that higher state of consciousness that is our birthright.

In the Western world, ‘art’ means something different to everyone: it is ‘self-expression’, social comment’, ‘art for art’s sake’, ‘a means for radicalizing the masses’ or ‘ an instrument for providing aesthetic pleasure’. In short, to us, ‘art’ is but seldom what it is meant to be, and what it has always been: a means of playing upon human faculties in such a way as to provoke a consciousness of superhuman realities - of the realm beyond the senses.

....Art is not meant to be ‘enjoyed’, it is meant to illuminate.....At its more common worst, Western art is egotism or neurosis, or both.

As for creativity, originality and the vaunted ‘freedom of expression’ that are allegedly so vital to the artist, they too are largely illusions. More often than not their importance is stressed not so much by artists as by scholars, art historians and aestheticians - who are not themselves artists. It is true that the dogma of ‘free self-expression’ is thoroughly ingrained in our upbringing, and most artists unthinkingly pay homage to it. But if we look closely at the methods employed by a good modern artist, even by one considered ‘abstract’, we soon see that, in the absence of a set canon or a theological imperative, the artist seeks, often desperately, to establish a personal ‘style’. 
Even today there is a kind of ‘art’ that is intended to guide the performer along the road to consciousness, though we tend not to think of this as ‘art’ but rather as exercise or discipline. Into this category of art fall Zen archery and painting, tea-making and the martial arts, and the dances of the Dervishes and of the temple dancers of India and Bali. With the possible exception of Zen painting, these arts are not meant to ‘communicate’. Watch a Dervish dance and you get nothing from it. Try to do a Dervish dance and you will be in for a big surprise.

 

• Wilfred Thesiger, ‘Arabian Sands’
  I have often looked back into my childhood for a clue to this perverse necessity which drives me from my own land to the deserts of the East. Perhaps it lies somewhere in the background of my memory: in journeys through the deserts of Abyssinia; in the thrill of seeing my father shoot an oryx when I was only three; in vague recollections of camel herds at water-holes; in the smell of dust and of acacias under a hot sun; in the chorus of hyenas and jackals in the darkness round the camp fire. But these dim memories are almost gone, submerged by later memories of the Abyssinian highlands, for it was there that I spent my childhood until I was nearly nine.

 

• Lewis Baltz, essay in ‘American Images’:
  ‘New Topographics’ offered a radically reductive view of the American environment. Where those images that could be gathered under the rubric of ‘Social Landscape’ had the appearance of candour and immediacy, taking as they had Robert Frank as their mentor and the snapshot as their vernacular model, Topographic photographers opted for a chillier vision, arid and dispassionate. Their mentor was Timothy O’Sullivan and their vernacular model the commercial real-estate photograph. One useful description of the working ideology was given by photographer Joe Deal in the New Topographics catalogue. ’In making these photographs I attempted to make a series of images in which one image is equal in weight or appearance to another. Many of the conscious decisions made while the series was evolving had to do with denying the uniqueness in the subject matter in one exposure as opposed to another in the belief that the most extraordinary images might be the most prosaic.’
  The conscious attempt to , if not eliminate, at least minimize the appearance of ‘style’ informed this approach to photography, as did the programmatic rejection of most of the elements and devices traditionally employed to make the world seem ‘interesting’ in photographs. These choices alone might explain why New Topographics’ work so alienated photographic audiences, defeating as it did the very expectations that they had been taught to bring to photographs.
  This approach, unyielding as it may appear, was arrived at through more than sheer perversity. More positive reasons exist for the emergence of this style at this particular historical moment. As Barbara Rose observed, ‘in a culture lacking a direct link with the mythologies of the classical world, an established church that encouraged religious art, or a monarchy to define the pinnacles of its social order, American art has traditionally found its most elevated subject matter in the natural landscape, often endowing it with qualities that transcend its literal appearance.
  Needless to say, this has been even truer of photography in America, where landscape has been among its most important and enduring subjects, Unfortunately, by the late 1960’ there was no convincing school of landscape photography in America. The vital West Coast School, founded by Edward Weston, had entered its late-mannerist phrase, typically producing oversized, overworked calendar pictures of mountains and black skies, while the Equivalent, with its roots in Stieglitz and carried through by Minor White, had degenerated into self-indulgent mystification.
  Redeeming the American landscape for photography seemed a worthy task an more difficult than one might imagine. The present generation of Americans, for the most part, never experienced the landscape without experiencing its counterforce, industrialism, and it seemed likely that without this dialectic the entire notion of ‘pure’ landscape might seem so estranged from ordinary reality as to appear escapist and sentimental. In this awareness topographic photographers surveyed the ‘new’ American landscape, attempting to see it whole and see it clear; motorways, shopping centres, housing tracts and all of the other elements that inform our perception of a landscape neither wholly natural nor wholly an agglomeration of industrial artefacts, the ‘middle landscape’ of late industrial pastoralism. This, even more than the heightened degree of traditional American photographic irony, was the vision that animated topographic photography in America during the last decade.
  

LL:
Some of the images produced by the ‘New Topographers’ is the nearest there is to some of my works. Yet, the content in our respective cases seems to be very wide apart. Of course, one has to question how appropriate the text by Lewis Baltz really is for any of them, and one should really adhere or apply this statement only to Baltz himself. His text is significant, however, to show how almost the same result can be obtained by totally non-identical motives. Whereas I do agree that I go for an arid vision, the last thing I can say about my work is that it is chilly and dispassionate.
Unlike Joe Deal, I try to bring the conscious decisions to a minimum and certainly keep them out while I take photographs, or selection them afterwards. 
I also do not try to eliminate or minimize the appearance ‘style’, I simply do not care about that. I cannot help it if it is there, and I just see it as an irrelevant by-product. 
Another important feature is the Americanism of the ‘new topography’. It is almost and probably a national movement as there does not seem to be any ‘new topographers’ outside the States. If it is true what Barbara Rose say, then this would be a sociological (and national) movement more than anything else. Whereas I am not interested in the landscape other than the ideal instrument for my research.

 

• Max Kozloff, The Privileged Eye, Atget’s Streets:
  ......MOMA inadvertently demeans the work it sets out to eulogize by denying significant artistic content to any Atget photograph that is held to be deficient in a visual quality of ‘grace’. On the contrary, if it were endowed with all the grace in the world, but bereft of Atget’s special time-haunted sense of the world, we would not recognize or care that the image is his. It would truly be soft in content, regardless of how well masses are arranged within the frame. Misconceptions about the role of form, favored over perceptions about the much more determining element of time in photographic discourse, are typical of modernist apologias of the medium.....
  

LL:
This last sentence sums up the features of both the modernists and post-modernists, that I do not agree with, assuming of course they are correct. Whereas I agree with Kozloff on the issue of the modernist misconceptions about the role of form [although I would not be surprised to find out there were many modernist artists who did not fall for these misconceptions], I find the ‘much more determining element of time’ not sufficient for the ‘art’ discourse, as ‘art’ ends up being a sociological etc. tool., at one extreme, or quasi-sociological etc. discourse, at the other extreme.

 

• Walker Evans, Hound and Horn, October 1931:
  ...Apparently he was oblivious to everything but the necessity of photographing Paris and its environs: but just what vision he carried in him of the monument he was leaving is not clear, It is possible to read into his photographs so many things he may never have formulated to himself... His general note is lyrical understanding of the street, trained observation of it, special feeling for patina, eye for revealing detail, over all of which is thrown a poetry which is not ‘the poetry of the street’ of the poetry of Paris but the projection of Atget’s person.

 

• Max Kozloff:
  ....Since Atget so clearly transgressed the humble utilitarian functions of his job, he must be an artist, despite himself....

 

• James L. Enyeart, Seductive Illusion (an essay on Stephen Shore):
  To the general public, the majority of Shore’s work has always seemed intellectual, detached, and to some, pedestrian.

 

• Thomas Weski, Expeditions to Explored Areas (an essay on Stephen Shore):
  When photography does not imitate other artistic techniques, but is applied purely, then if successful it can lead to a highly specific form of content-oriented art that has been solved formally.
  Shore uses the stylistic methods of documentary photography, but his images are the results of a subjective vision.

 

• John Szarkowski:
  For Winogrand, as perhaps for most ambitious photographers of this century, the essential supportive audience was often small enough to gather around a cafe table.

 

• Catherine Grout, Who is Speaking? (an essay on Lewis Baltz):
  If it is possible today to identify a signature style in Baltz’s black-and-white works, this was not so clearly the case at the time they were made. Time imposes style on even those works in which it is least evident.
  
  
  

• Robert Adams, interviewed by Thomas Weski for the reprint of 'The New West', 2000:
  TW: What led you to take the pictures?
  RA: Pleasure. The light was compelling.... I also wanted to change society.
  LL: This statement somewhat puts the environmental narrative/issue of the New Topography on its head, perceivably bringing its validity into question.
  
  
  

• Wynn Bullock, March ’75:
  You can have an intense visual experience for which you have been prepared by maybe hundreds of photographs, but the feeling at that point is almost nil because it cannot be sustained all the time. I cannot feel about Weston’s ‘Peppers’ the way I did when I first saw it. I have to look at it sparingly.

 

• Abigail Solomon Godeau, Winning the Game When the Rules Have Been Changed: Art Photography and Postmodernism:
  It is from this wellspring that the most interesting and provocative new work in photography has tended to come. Although this relatively recent outpouring of art production utilising photography covers a broad spectrum of concerns, intentions, and widely differing formal strategies, the common denominator is its collective resistance to any type of formal analysis, psychological interpretation, or aesthetic reading Consistent with the general tenor of postmodern practice, such work takes as its point of departure not the hermetic enclave of aesthetic self-referencing, but rather, the social and cultural world of which it is a part. Thus, if one of the major claims of modernist art theory was the insistence on the autonomy and purity of the work of art, postmodern practice hinges on the assertion of contingency and the primacy of cultural codes. It follows that a significant proportion of postmodern art based on photographic usages is animated by a critical, or, if one prefers, deconstructive impulse. The intention of such work is less about provoking feeling, than provoking thought.