Remembering the Present

Venice, June 2010 by way of Venice, 1600

“It seems the longer you live in New York,the more you love a city that has vanished, For those of us well versed in the art of loving what is lost, it is an easy leap to missing something that was never really there.”

– Jeremiah Moss, “Nighthawks State of Mind,” NEW YORK TIMES, July 3, 2010

Venice, June 2010

I have seen the future and it is the past.

The more I explore my creative life, the more I realize that I consciously and unconsciously try to connect my work with a wistful and sometimes dark recreation of the past. Old films, old photographs, the work of the Dutch painters, dreams and nightmares all inspire my images and my writing.

The trips to Buenos Aires explored a dance and a culture that seemed old world and yet contemporaneous at the same time. While marking my fiftieth birthday, I both celebrated the future while recreating a past.

The very nature of what I am doing is a recreation of the past. Photography’s nature is to freeze a moment in time. For many decades we have looked at photography as a record of the present, an objective “snapshot” in time. The shutter clicks and we freeze a fraction of second in a tableau. It is accurate as far as what is captured, but completely influenced by what the photographer has seen.

Whether it is the Kodak Instamatic pictures of our childhood or Neil Armstrong standing next to the flag on the moon, the very presence of the camera gives the occasion authenticity. I might argue that the only thing authentic is the image itself in its own context, not as a complete document of its subject.

The aesthetics and the reality of the shot are greatly influenced by photographer’s eye, the angle and lens choice, the aperture and shutter speed, the quality of light, the rearrangement or posing of subjects, and often sheer happy luck.

These all have been with us practically from the beginning of photography. Many of the processes in Photoshop such as masking, burning, dodging, alteration of exposure, contrast, cropping are a direct reflection of the processes used in the wet darkroom.

Now that digital imaging has entered the world, we have the ability to alter images at will: combine, composite, recolor, create a pastiche or a distortion. As with the artist’s palette and canvas, the limits of digital imaging capabilities are only limited by the digital artist’s imagination and skill.

This creates ethical dilemmas for photojournalists. How much can the image be altered until it is not a record but fiction?

For those of us who are not tremendously skilled in Photoshop but who are either good or lucky at capturing the image (or “taking the picture” in the old nomenclature) become frustrated because viewers now assume the image is put together in post-process. This takes some of the joy out of showing unique moments. Part of the joy that film photographers felt when they were able to capture what Henri Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment” was anticipating their audience’s wonder of their timing, skill and vision.

These images are from a workshop I have just attended that was run by VSP Workshops. During the workshop we recreated some of the scenes and feel of the Carnival in Venice during the summer away from the crowds and at times to catch the models in the most beneficial light.

Venice itself is a magnificent anachronism and the images we produced revel in their anachronism. In some of the images, I enhance the effect by adding sepia in post-processing. They portray an imagined past that never existed and a reflection of my mood during the period: contemplative, wistful interpretive and respectful of the past while firmly rooted in the moment.They are at once the expression of the present and of the past.

To paraphrase George Santayana, those who do not rememember the present are condemned to omit it.

Advertisement