I learned that before you can make a picture, you have to find the spot, and you find the spot by walking. There is a walking activity with the machine and you are not peering through it - you are sort of sniffing, you are like a dog, trying to find the right spot. It is very, very instinctive... There is always a sense of anticipation and richness of something to come - a journey to be made, almost a narrative...
Geoffrey James, photographer
The Photographer's Stance: The Space of the Image, The Position of the Photographer
Gary Winograd, who knew a good deal about where to stand when it was time to take the photograph, and who may have made of his personal position a minor revolution in photographic composition, once said of Eugene Atget that he knew where to stand when he took the photograph. This, at least, is the story that John Szarkowski tells, and among very many other things, Szarkowski wrote the books on both photographers; he has earned the right to judge them. From Winogrand, there might not be a higher compliment.
While photography has almost always celebrated its subject and its technique, while it has made a fetish of the moment of the photograph –– the genius of its time and its timing –– and the beauty of the final form of the image, while it now obsesses over the distribution of the image and what effect that distribution might have on the form of the image –– and on its purpose –– the success of any photograph is still rooted in the photographer’s stance: what place the photographer takes in space, what he or she brings to that position. This series of seminars, documentary films, and projects examines the point from which the photographer takes the photograph –– her position in relation to what is recorded, phenomenally, technically, culturally, personally –– and how he chooses to record it –– another position, of sorts. It is an examination of intentions, not because good intentions justify weak work, but because good work is intentional.
Beginning with an examination of the documentary tradition and the topographic tradition and their recurrence as a motif in photography, the first seminars will examine several aesthetic propositions regarding the photograph, and set out a schema for the consideration of photographs and of photographic practice.
Supplemented with readings, but primarily using photobooks, seminars will examine a selection of work from particular photographers –– Eugene Atget, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Gary Winogrand and Lee Friedlander; Edward S. Curtis, Weegee, Richard Avedon, and Martin Parr; William Henry Jackson, Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, and Thomas Struth; Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Paul Strand, Ansel Adams (again), and W. Eugene Smith; Robert Capa, Diane Arbus, Larry Clark, Nan Golden, James Nachtwey, Sally Mann, and Boris Mikhailov; August Sander, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lewis Baltz, and Thomas Struth (again) –– their positions, the distinctions of these positions, their advantages and the disadvantages, and the motifs that form their work. Alongside this survey, there will be two other studies –– [1] a review of particular single images, drawn from a wide number of sources, and [2] a brief survey of several of the institutions (organizations, exhibitions, publications, agencies) that shaped the modern discourse of the photographic position –– that will work to assess the effectiveness of photography generally, and presume to locate our own work, at least approximately, in its practice. Throughout the seminars, there will be an on-going discussion of technique, and of particular techniques.
To supplement the seminars, there will be a trip to Toronto to meet with photographers, curators, and dealers to study excellent photographs first hand, to hear from those photographers, and to discuss the positions various photographers take in their work. There will twelve seminars in the course, but eight of them will be doubled up, and given on the same day so that the entire course will be over by June 24th.
The field trip will be on a weekend and it will take the entire day.
The seminars will begin at 1:00 pm and, every second week also at 4:00 pm, on Wednesdays. The official address for these meetings will be my office, but, for the most part, I think it is best if they go on around the big table in the north-west corner of the library.
There will be four assignments in the course –– three photo-essays and one illustrated, written essay of 2,000 words. The assignments may be done in any order; they will be reviewed at set times during the seminars. As long as the photo-essays are in fact photographic, they may take any form and adopt any technique. We will review work every week.
Come prepared.
Donald McKay, May 2009
