Little Truths

I probably shouldn't admit this, because I'm supposed to act like big serious Mr. Expert and all (although I'm not much for pretense and ostentation, as you might know if you've been reading me for a while—cf. the book link at the bottom of this post), but here goes: I actually kind like those jokey collections of cutesy/funny pictures that the Internet is full of. Not the sort of pictures I should be looking at? I guess. But we all look at more kinds of pictures than we can even categorize. It's almost like breathing the air. Lot of chaff in those, of course, but the gems that fall past really are gems.

A photograph at its most basic can tell us something true about the world, or about human beings, or animals, or about something that happened...not "Truth," capital T, but just truths. Little ones.

It's the main thing that separates it from art. It can be more about Observation than Creation. Note caps.

I have a friend who passes these along sometimes. Here's one that made me actually "LOL" (he's all gung-ho about the start of baseball season):

Hilarious. Very human, seems to me. Also very photographic in its essence—not something an artist might think to invent. (Also something you might look at and not even "get" unless you were thinking about it. I think we humans "see mindlessly" the great majority of the time.)

Here's one the same friend also sent me:

He has no idea where it came from. Anybody know anything about it?

This picture strikes me as funny, yes, but poignant as well, and layered—it says a lot about photography, about human concerns with image, in the sense of status and appearances, meta-concerns about truth and falsification, about imagination, about the ideal versus the real, even about hope in the face of despair. It's a wonderful photograph about photography.

I want to know more about it.

Mike
(Thanks to Kim)

UPDATE: It's from the AP, captioned, "A photographer uses his own backdrop to mask Poland's World War II ruins while shooting a portrait in Warsaw in November of 1946. (AP Photo/Michael Nash)." A big thanks to sepp and several others for the information.

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Kenneth Tanaka: "'...Not something an artist might think to invent.' Exactly. These are scenes that only work as photography. Paintings and drawings might be cute but they would not carry the testimonial value that a photograph carries. Further, one way to measure your progress as a photographer is whether or not you're consistently able to see and capture such moments."

John Wilson: "The camera the photographer is using is interesting. It looks like one of those old street box cameras which used paper negatives and were developed inside the camera. Apparently they are still being used in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There's a very interesting site that goes into some depth about how they are used."

Stan B.: "Apparently, they've reconstructed Old Town Warsaw down to the very last detail—not necessarily as it once was, but as an Italian painter once imagined it to be...."

Mike replies: Good post; good find. I'd like to see it anyway, just for what it is. They don't have this reputation here, so much, but Polish craftsmanship can be amazing.

Chris Lucianu: "After looking at the picture of the photographer using a trompe-everything-backdrop, read the entry on the planned destruction of Warsaw, then look again at the picture. I think it deserves quite a caption.

Likewise, if you look at the page linked to by Stan B., don't just read the brief intro (which I find condensed to almost the point of flippancy). Do yourself a favour and listen to the audio feature untangling the threads of a story as poignant as it is complicated, courtesy of Amy Drozdowska, Michał Murawski and Dave McGuire. Or, taking a somewhat less post-modern view, read art historian Małgorzata Omilanowska's Views of Warsaw by Bernardo Bellotto Called Canaletto and their Role in the Reconstruction of Warsaw's Monuments. Vana Tallinn (2010), if you can obtain it (and kudos if you do).

It becomes clear that the post-war reconstruction team led by Jan Zachwatowicz aimed at re-creating the aspect of an ideal late-Baroque Warsaw (with its Gothic and Renaissance heritage) as it would have existed at the time of Stanisław August Poniatowski, the last Polish king. Bernardo Bellotto's alleged 'imagination' can hardly be faulted. On the contrary, Bellotto was an astonishingly accurate painter of urban landscapes, who used a camera obscura to draw minute documentary sketches which were then integrated into a grand veduta. (Perhaps it is a good opportunity to remind ourselves of the synthetic aspect of painting as opposed to snapshots.)

I spent some time last year studying Bellotto in Dresden, the other center of the painter's activity; and also a city victim of the war, although, unlike Warsaw, a a more haphazard victim. It takes some time to realise that Bellotto was a painter of the social fabric as well as of architecture. The passing of time would have sufficed to transform the buildings he minutely documented into as much a trompe-l'esprit as the Warsaw photographer's canvas. But now, with his paintings more 'original' than the very cityscapes they depicted, we might as well be painting on a mirror.

Andrew Molitor: "I actually wrote a little thing about the 'meme' thing, where you take a picture and apply a caption and get that pseudo-motivational poster.

"It's actually a great lesson in how a caption alters our perception of a photograph. You can take the same photo of some dumb cat, apply 30 captions to it, and create 30 quite different 'experiences of the image.' The captions tend to drive a little imagined narrative to go with the image, and the successful ones drive quite a strong narrative.

"So, they're not just silly funny fun things! They have a little something to teach us about art and the human brain!"

 

Comments

[sepp]

Michael Nash AP, Warsaw (1946) - according to Google image search.

[Marcin]

The second picture was taken in the ruined Warsaw in 1946 after the end of World War II by Michael Nash AP. If my memory does not fail, because I had already seen this picture somewhere.

[John Wilson]

The photograph was taken by Michael Nash in Warsaw in 1946. He worked for AP at the time

[Richard Tugwell]

Mike said -

"It can be more about Observation than Creation. "

Ahem..

I suppose I could go on until I'm blue in the face about photography being more literature than painting....... (in many, even most of it's forms. And the form that most resembles painting, the so-called fine art photograph, is in my opinion the one least worthy of attention)

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Google Image Search got a major upgrade a long time ago when I wasn't looking (hence my not knowing exactly when), and you can upload or give them the URL of an image to find "similar" images to.

I've got a firefox extension that makes that a right-click option on any image I see on the web. (Called "find copyright infringements", but of course many of the uses it finds, and most of the ones that interest me, are legit).

Anyway, it finds the AP/Nash attribution as the #1 hit. It's a tool that should be in your toolkit.

[Kalli]

I love the second photo in this post (the first one, the lolmacro, is very good, but appeals to me in a very different way).

What is maybe the most touching thing about that photo is how I think I can understand why people would want to do this. I'd think it'd be more "valuable" to take photos of the people in the environment as it is, but how sick would one not be of the war and the destruction and death it has brought.

[Scott Jones]

These are marvelous Mike, and I would love to see these as a regular feature on your blog. Very entertaining and also valuable in thinking about photography. Please share these gems!

[Andreas]

"Also very photographic in its essence—not something an artist might think to invent."

That also surprised me as a definition (or explanation)of photography that I have never thought of. Now I will think about it...

[ScottW]

Perhaps a different form of artist? Gary Larson's "Midvale School for The Gifted" springs straight to mind....

[Another phil]

I could imagine the second pic set-up being something you would send to your emigrated family to say "look I'm fine, no need to worry". You wouldn't necessarily want them to see the reality.

I really like your posts; they make me think and then find blogs like this one;
http://dougprinceblog.blogspot.co.uk/

[Richard Skoonberg]

Two comments. I love the notion that there is photographic art and then that other "Art." Street photography is a perfect example of photographic art. It is unique to photography. It will never be confused with painting. What other kinds of content are unique to photography?

The second image is quite moving. It reminds me of that wonderful book, Life Smiles Back, a collection of photos that were from the Miscellany page--the last page in Life Magazine. Always humorous and inventive. The book was a favorite of my children and their friends.

[Steve Pritchard]

The Warsaw picture strikes me as joyfully defiant.
It could be entitled, "How to wave goodbye to Nazism... with but a single finger."

[David Aiken]

" Also very photographic in its essence—not something an artist might think to invent."

Can I disagree? Take a look at a lot of Japanese pop fashion, just as logically implausible as the combination of reversed cap and hand as sunshade in that image, but straight copies from Japanese anime. I could also say the same of the copperplate handwriting style which was developed when people tried to copy the inaccurate way in which copperplate engravings imitated the transition from thin to thick produced by a chisel point nib.

Artists have often been the inventors, Photography is a great populariser, and carries a testimonial value that other art forms don't as Kenneth Tanaka pointed out, but artists have often been the inventors both wittingly and unwittingly.

In fact when it comes to style and fashion it's hard to argue that artists haven't been the inventors if you're prepared to accept that designers are artists and I think they are.

[Steve]

Mike:

Re: "A photograph at its most basic can tell us something true about the world, or about human beings, or animals, or about something that happened...not "Truth," capital T, but just truths. Little ones."

I believe photographs do tell the Truth, with a capital 'T'. Your statement would seem to imply that there is a higher level of truth; one not of the mortal realm-- perhaps some omnipotent supreme being? I believe the ball cap photo tells the truth about human nature with a capital 'T'.

Best regards,
Steve

[Manuel]

The second picture is, as you say, poignant. "Pathetic" would be accurate, in that it prompts a pathos, but rather inappropriate in view of the way this adjective is used nowadays. The picture makes me think about how sweet it would be for some if they could live in a dream instead of reality - which can be rather sordid sometimes. It is a very powerful picture, and I can't help feeling some kind of tenderness for the woman being portraited: that portrait would be her way of escaping the cruel reality of her life. Above all, it states that photography is first and foremost an illusion. I can't think of a better photograph to illustrate such statement.

[Lou Doench]

I remember the first time I saw the former image on Facebook I cringed, because I have done exactly that. Of course I had a reason, I had a big honking dslr in the other hand and every time I brought it up to my eye the hat got in the way!

[Bill Tyler]

Google image search is really great for identifying images like this. I just dragged the Warsaw image into the search panel, and came up with a ton of links to Michael Nash, AP, 1946, and the Warsaw Ghetto.

[Marcelo Guarini]

When I was young, they use to build hats with the shade on the front, now they do them whith the shade on the sides or on the back.
Human stupidity has no limits.
Sorry I couldn't resist.

Regards

[Jamie Salcedo]

The WWII is amusing. I don't think any filter or light meter in the world could make any photo that comes out that look remotely real.

[Cmans]

LOL, LOL, LOL! I keep getting drawn-back to viewing this photo because mentally I haven't finished "looking" at it. I'm pondering the backstory, the bombs, the death, hunger, etc. Where is her family? How did she get the money to pay for this? Her forward-thinking in that she might not live long enough to be able to have a nice picture taken of her after a rebuild that might not ever happen. The photographer is in town only this week, so act fast, etc. Fast forward, now her Modern-day relatives view this picture and see her sitting in a mid-summer setting, but she is wearing a long WINTER COAT! Obviously (to you and me) needed because judging from all the snow on the ground around them it must be frigidly cold!