Wonderful pieces on photography at Mark Woods's site yesterday. I read the lot.
"By photographs that found themselves do I mean the "lucky or happy accident"? That is one name for it. "Happy accident" is a name that I ought not to mention because many an extraordinary snapshot is passed off lightly with this appellation instead of being explained. I do mention it because it is a term of helplessness in the face of a photograph that is a freak, a sport in a man's work-unexplainable, so unsought for, so unaccountable that it is almost embarrassing. I have heard Edward Weston say that he strove to eliminate all accidents from his work and I copied his striving. I submitted to that discipline by which one earns the elimination of all accidents. I have made enough pictures so that now I see like a lens focused on a piece of film, act like a negative projected on a piece of sensitized paper, talk like a picture on a wall. I have even been so presumptuous as to try to tell others how to see, act, and talk likewise. I know fairly well how to eliminate accidents from my photographing, and, paradoxically, in so doing I have also learned that the happy accident can be cultivated!
"I must admit to many accidents in my own work before I undertook the practice of learning to avoid them — and to many more since. Such accidents when they happen now, however, are not isolated incidents, unexplainable events, as infrequent as stumbling on mountain peaks in a fog. After learning to eliminate accidents I can now sometimes trace the hawser marks between cause and effect — between chance and photograph. Why? Or how? In acquiring a discipline of seeing, and a technique of communication, I put myself into the position of the reckless driver of whom it is said, there goes a maniac in search of an accident."
Minor White | Found Photographs
"And while I put myself in the path of accidents, the term "accident" is a misnomer here. Hence I am pleased at the crash in the kitchen because it was not a crash but an explosion. As one porcelain bowl died a thousand thoughts were born; a score of unexplained photographs were seen to be, not accident, but photographs that found themselves. By my discipline of seeing I put myself where photographs can find themselves.
"The German publication Photomagazin printed a brief and sprightly piece by Roman Frietag in 1955. He said that each camera had a subconscious. He further made the astounding observation that this subconscious is responsible for the extraordinary snapshot — and that it does so while the photographer thinks he is looking. Frietag may have been sprightly instead of serious, because, if serious, no one would have listened to him. So with tongue in cheek (apparently) he traced down the cause of these unexplained photographs to a machine's subconscious. And what a powerful subconscious it is. This personality inadvertently built into cameras at the drafting board can on occasion steer the unsuspecting and probably quite innocent owner. He is not alone in allocating minds to machines; long before our highly touted electronic brains took over, people in many places observed the phenomena. Ships are "she" for instance.
Minor White | Found Photographs
I have a passion for photography (and humour of the type used by White and Thoreau). Intuitively, I knew that, like the monkeys, typewriters, and Shakespeare's sonnets, my chances of putting myself where a photograph might find itself lay in the frequency with which I allowed the camera to do its work. So that's all I've been doing these past eighteen months; careening around waiting for a photograph to come into being.
For me, the above snaps illustrate White's point — as do the plays on words and oceanic metaphors. My daughter was awed by my having caught the above ship passing before the sun as it set off Cape Point. Frankly, so was I. I hadn't seen it. It was part of a sequence of photographs. Before taking that shot, I'd taken this one. It's a different resolution. Through my viewfinder, I had no chance of seeing it in any conventional sense.
The ship had been invisible to me until, when it passed in front of the setting sun, I felt the need to zoom in on the colour lighting the horizon, the sky, and the sea. The 'accident' is partly its timing. I might have zoomed in only when the ship had moved on, as it has done in the second snap (immediately above), and the third and fourth. I would have been out of time and place to allow the occurrence of something with which Mr. Minor White is all too familiar. I see much in the picture. He does, after all, point out that "Ships are 'she'".
And so it goes. There is much more to these articles and Mark's accompanying selection — particularly his inclusion of Thoreau's Walking, the serendipitous timing of which I'm sure Andie and Caspar would appreciate.
By the way, I'm not saying "Things happen for a reason." I'm just noting that "things happen". I've lived through much of that happening and I've slept through much of it. It doesn't matter. I count myself lucky to be in a position where I can at least look out to see.
Reverting to yesterday's news. I picked up on Cape Talk that Peter Wheeler, the 55-year old builder beaten and kicked to death in the Grabouw SAPS holding cells Saturday night, is the second person killed after being arrested by Grabouw police. Wheeler was apparently arrested for public drunkenness after pulling his car over to the side of the road when he felt himself incapable of driving.
According to a caller or field reporter, three weeks ago the police arrested a farm labourer for domestic abuse and threw him in the cells despite his wife's protestations. When the woman went to the station to collect her husband the following morning, he had disappeared. The police told her he had been released some time earlier. She later found he had died in hospital from injuries consistent with those inflicted by a beating.
The Prisoner's Rights Organisation, Saphor, has accused the police of gross negligence. Cape Talk's web site does not cite the earlier incident. Although two of Wheeler's cell mates have appeared briefly in court, the Independent Complaints Directorate (IDC) is investigating Wheeler's (and presumably the farm worker's) murder.
John Maytham's stand-in seemed genuinely surprised at the implications of these two deaths. It seems the police might be involved. Perhaps his surprise was feigned. The South African police regularly beat people to death.
I recall a drunk being beaten to death in the Claremont cells a couple of years ago. The cops do it for fun. Or to relieve stress. Or for whatever other reason they can think of should they ever be called to account for their behaviour.
