On Photography

Do images bring you to tears?

If they don't, are you sure you're alive?

I got a sudden shock (shock--you know, that this too, too flesh will one day be worm meat) just now watching a 1956 CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) TV show about Yousef Karsh and his photographic work from his studio at the Chateau Laurier Hotel in downtown Ottawa. I've never seen him work (although we all know his work) until just now, and I was born in Ottawa in 1956. How about that.

Whatever you may want to say, there is an art to photography.

I suppose my first inclination to this art was from a series of books I was fortunate to receive as a kid from my parents published by Time-Life Books all about photography.

Have you ever made a photograph?

I know many Gaga colleagues out there have. It's much different than "taking" a photograph. Those that know what I mean, well, know what I mean. Those that don't, well, read on.

We photographers all start from the mystery and wonder that is light. From there, technological wizardry invented by some French and British alchemists around 1839, who played around with certain elements, found out that when silver molecules were struck with light energy and then chemically manipulated, they produced remarkably accurate two-dimensional, black & white images. These are rendered flat through a lens but retained an incredibly accurate (at least to our wonderful brain and faculty of synthesis) rendition of what light looks like when it strikes objects.

The single most important aspect of photography is exposure, which is the ratio of how much and how long light strikes a light-sensitized material (mostly made with film emulsion-- silver and color dyes suspended in gelatin [cow bones] against a plastic base). That is the art of photography in its most fundamental sense. Other facets of the art of photography are related to visual arts in general--design, line, form, shape, color, symmetry, and, in the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, wholeness, unity, and clarity--For things that are not whole are not complete; Unity is the cohesion of all the parts that make up a whole; and Clarity is the most elusive, that being the ability of an object to "enchant the heart".

Anyway, those that know what I am talking about know this. Those that don't, I hope it moves you to be more interested in this art of photography.

While we all probably have looked at tens of thousands of photographs in our lives, there are some that reverberate in our minds as being really something.

For the most part, I bet there are family photos that really do the trick. You know, a picture either you've taken or a family member has taken that moves you in some way. It might not even be about the "quality" of the image. It might be more about "a remembrance", as Proust would wax on about, "about things past".

Besides these sentimental images, there are photos that are great objects in and for themselves, which perhaps display qualities that go beyond mere sentiment and really are in tune with how light works within the perceptions of our human faculties on objects we designed.

I present three images here--one by Karsh, one by Gary Winograd, and one by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Yes, of course, there are four dozen other people I would like to choose to talk about but I so happen to settle on these three.

What moved me about the Karsh image is the object of the study—Robert Oppenheimer-the father of the atomic bomb.

It's hard to imagine this doe-eyed genius was responsible for the development of the atomic weapons that were eventually dropped on Japan to end World War II.

I know something else about Oppenheimer--at the moment the first atom bomb was tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico, he said, "Now I am Shiva, destroyer of universes." This of course is from the Mahabharata, the Indian Vedic scripture.

Here was a Harvard grad quoting the Sanskrit literature of India. Just look at the photo--look at the language that surrounds him on the chalkboard. Mysterious, religious, mathematics.

The second image is by I think my favorite photographer for his sense of form, playfulness, and mastery of silver printing--Gary Winograd. If you ever have an opportunity to see a Gary Winograd print--I mean, REAL photographic print--it will transform you. Not only are his images wonderful, but the quality of the silver-coated paper will amaze you. When I first saw a Gary Winograd print at the Eastman House in Rochester, NY, it was like being in the presence of a true master.

And the last image is the first photographer I fell in love with—Henri Cartier-Bresson. His "decisive moment"--the knack of capturing in a fraction of a second a moment that revealed some epiphany of life--stands the test of time.

May you find the beauty of photographs made by those that really work through the medium as delightful to your heart as any art form you currently accept as being worthy of your attention.

Your Gaga