06/05/2017
Seaweed and the Art of Photography
Here’s the first Facebook blog post about my photography. More will gradually follow, each time accompanied by one of my photos reviewed by the post. I start by putting today’s blog post and picture in context.
Decades ago, when I first started to take pictures, I did so for very traditional reasons – capturing family and friends in interesting poses or activities, as well as famous landscapes and human creations from the Parthenon to Petra. Those days I didn’t wander about “searching” for more distinctive photos. I had no particular goals for my photography, other than to record my travels. It was a welcome companion, no more.
Gradually my ambitions expanded. I wanted to shoot a “good” picture, a “worthy” picture, that would engage its viewer and be recognized as having merit from such perspectives as composition, colors, moods, relationships, suggestiveness. I wanted my pictures to say something about my view of the world, and I wanted them to please me and their viewers as photographic “art”. These were indeed ambitious goals. To pursue them, the most exciting and rewarding part of my photographic ventures became “searching” for a picture.
For this blog post, I’ve made an unusual choice of a companion picture. Of course I really like it. Else it wouldn’t appear in my first book of photographs, the recently published Eyeing the World. That book shows the 83 pictures I selected from a very
large number that were taken over a half century. But this image of seaweed is neither my favorite nor recent. Why then select it? Taken in 1963, it’s the book’s oldest photo. More important, it carries a tale that I vividly recall to this day.
Walking along a deserted beach north of Boston on a late autumn day, I noticed a solitary seaweed (probably two intertwined bits of seaweed) on smooth sand. Its delicacy and arrangement reminded me of calligraphy in an Asian tongue. The colors were soft and complementary. Its attraction was irresistible. While mulling about how to take a picture, I thought that the bare sand offered a tepid frame or surrounding for the seaweed. Something was missing. I needed another object, some other point of interest, in my composition. A smooth small stone that lay nearby offered the solution. I dropped it where it best complemented the seaweed, and took my picture.
Reflecting later on this experience, I felt a certain guilt about adding the stone. The picture was no longer “honest.” It reached beyond simply recording the scene, the cardinal function of photography. My intervention had transformed that scene. I was deceiving the viewer. This self-accusation stayed with me a while.
Sometime later, I came to realize how inadequate and indeed false this notion of “recording” was for my kind of picture-taking. In the process of taking and developing a picture, I could not escape consciously making multiple decisions and choices. That particular seaweed could have spurred a hundred photographers to produce a whole range of images. Their agency in producing those pictures went so far beyond “recording.” Hardly the scientist intent on portraying exactly what she saw, no more and no less, I had become something of an artist who, while starting with and working from nature, created my own images. Viewers of an image would later continue this process of creation by reaching their own interpretation and understanding of it. In the course of my academic life (my basic career), that insight figured importantly in my reading of some postmodern theory. Until today, the seaweed has been a kind of marker among ongoing changes in my views about the art of photography.
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Now and then I’ll post more blogs about other pictures. Interested viewers will find a variety of images on my website, www.henrysteinerphotos.com. Of course I would be pleased if a viewer who enjoyed this blog post and picture were to consider passing it on to friends.
