Random Excellence: Photographer Unknown

I thought I'd try something a little different for "Random Excellence" today. This isn't an expressive photograph; it's a descriptive one. That's its purpose. It's not "authored" in the sense we usually think of. It's an auction house catalog photograph of an object for sale.

For some reason I was struck by this Garry Winogrand comment, at the outset of the new documentary:

Winogrand: "Well, what is a photograph?"

Background voice: "I don't know. You tell me what they meant to you."

Winogrand (interrupting): Well I'll tell you, I'll tell you what a photograph is. It's the illusion of a literal description of how a camera saw a piece of time and space. Consider this. What does a camera do? What does photography do better than anything else, but describe? To use it for anything else is rather foolish."

There's something nice and neat and clean about description as a first principle for the way photographs work. I like it. Photography subverts any definition of itself, and we could come up with examples of photographs that describe nothing. But I've always been skeptical about meaning as the first principle. This picture describes a guitar. It doesn't mean anything. It tells no stories. It has no significance.

That doesn't mean there are no stories to be told. What the picture shows is a model D-35 acoustic guitar made by the C.F. Martin & Company, Nazareth, Pennsylvania, in 1969, serial number 244869. The guitar belongs to David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, who said that of all his guitars, it has the most songs associated with it. In 1969 he was on his way to Manny's Music, a guitar store in Midtown Manhattan, but bought this on the street before he got there. It was his primary studio acoustic guitar for both his Pink Floyd years* and for his solo recordings. You can hear it, for example, on the album Wish You Were Here. The title song starts off as though we're listening to a radio, and then at about 40 seconds in a much more present guitar chimes in, as if a guitarist were playing along with the radio. That second, more immediate guitar is the one pictured above.

That's significant to people who love classic British rock or are fans of Pink Floyd, but the significance isn't contained in the photograph. It's in the object the picture describes. Does knowing what the object is imbue the photograph with more meaning for you? Even if it doesn't, you can understand how it might for others. There is almost always more to know about things described in a photograph, which is why I'm not one of those who say "a photograph has to stand alone." All that means is that sometimes there's nothing to say...which is fair enough. But it doesn't mean there's nothing that could be said, if we knew more. To claim there is never anything more to learn about the world of appearances, never anything to know about what a picture describes, is a bankrupt attitude. Or at least a barren one. There is always more that could be known about what a descriptive photograph describes. Our curiosity about that, I believe, is part of what brings photographs to life.

David Gilmour's guitar collection is being auctioned off this coming June. This, along with several photographs of Gilmour playing it and facsimiles of repair receipts, is estimated at $10,000 to $20,000.

Curiously, the collection itself, like a rock act, is going on tour—selected highlights will be on display at Christie's Los Angeles in May.

Mike

*"The guitar was first seen in the recording studio during sessions for the 1972 soundtrack album Obscured by Clouds. [...] The acoustic can be heard on the tracks 'Wot's… Uh The Deal,' 'Childhood’s End' and 'Free Four.'

"Gilmour confirms that the guitar was present for writing purposes during the recording sessions for the band's 1973 masterpiece The Dark Side of the Moon at London’s Abbey Road Studios between May 1972 and January 1973, although no acoustic parts were recorded for the final record. The D-35 has become most readily identified with the acoustic title track of Pink Floyd’s next studio album Wish You Were Here, another concept album, built around the theme of absence [...] the acoustic can be heard on the track 'Welcome To The Machine,' as well as the timeless 'Wish You Were Here,' hailed by Rolling Stone as the band’s most enduring composition." (From the Lot Essay.)

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

(Not) everything must fade away

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

Ben Rosengart: "Manny's Music, which closed in 2009, was part of 'Music Row,' a series of music shops on 48th St. in Manhattan. I would guess that Gilmour didn't obtain this instrument literally 'on the street,' but rather popped in to some other store en route to Manny's. Although I didn't haunt Music Row until some 20 years after Gilmour, I never saw anyone hawking instruments outdoors."

hugh crawford replies to Ben: "Across the street from Manny's Music and a little to the west, between Sam Ash and Rudy's, there was a store with four-foot high letters saying 'We Buy Guitars,' known to everyone as simply 'We Buy.' They served as the place that the clueless and desperate would sell guitars at low prices. I knew people who would hang out in front of We Buy on Saturday morning cherry-picking guitars. (I used to do the same thing on 32nd Street buying old cameras. I once got a Crown Graphic kit for $15 when a store offered $10.) Anyway, anyone who knew anything about selling guitars in NYC would know that you would get a better price for a Martin at Matt Umanov on Bleeker Street, so picking up a cheap Martin on 48th street from some clueless guy with a guitar to sell sounds perfectly plausible to me.

"Come to think of it, my wife bought a car from someone stopped at a red light in NYC. We were standing on a corner in SoHo and I said how much I loved Volvo station wagons, and one with a for sale sign stopped in front of where we were standing. NYC is like that."

anthony reczek: "Another level of meaning comes comes from actually owning and playing a (1975) Martin D-35; that personalizes the photo for me. It initially triggered memories of my brother, from whom I inherited the instrument, which morphed into memories of how it sounded earlier today in a gig as a strolling musician at a nursing facility. How the residents responded, the acoustics in different hallways etc., etc. That's just for starters; this 'descriptive' photo quickly became a veritable rabbit hole of 'meaning' for me."

Mike replies: That's great. It's perfectly valid, of course, and crucial. What the viewer brings to a photograph is a big part of how it operates. It's one reason why people can have such varied responses to art. One of the basic problems of art appreciation is that sometimes people who believe they "don't know anything about art" discount their own responses, dismissing their personal associations as being not valid because (they think) they aren't part of the maker's immediate intention and aren't sanctified by some imagined authority. It's odd that sometimes we have to be trained to feel our own feelings about things. I reserve the right to react to art as if my experience of it is a significant experience for me, and I reserve the right to bring to it whatever I bring to it.

I suspect the reason I wrote this post in the first place is because I bought that Pink Floyd album when I lived way out in the countryside after dropping out of college. It was a difficult time of my life. Seeing the guitar that struck those notes took me back to the first time I heard the song, sitting on a couch in that old house in Vermont.

David Comdico: "Winogrand is direct in his insights into photography in the same way that a photograph is direct. This parallel always strikes me in how performative it is.

"Gilmour's guitar is a good example of Barthes' explanation in Camera Lucida of how 'the referent adheres' which is maybe just a fancy way of saying what Winogrand said from the other side. A photograph resists becoming a sign and in order to observe the signifier (not just any guitar but Gilmour's guitar) 'requires a secondary action of knowledge or of reflection.'

"Barthes supports his claim that the photograph is unable to serve as a sign (the magical guitar that made spawned many Pink Floyd hits) by stating that the 'marking' doesn't take. Barthes says it 'turns' like milk—which I always associate with old advertising that in a decade often looks ridiculous—'buy this product' turns to 'can you believe people actually bought this product?'

"In a collection of photos of Martin guitars there is no Gilmourness to this particular photo that makes it stand out as such. It then turns back to being a description of a guitar—and the information in the image proves that the guitar is a 6-string not a 12 string.

"In short the photo needs to have a caption 'Gilmour's guitar on which he wrote "Wish You Were Here" etc.' where the solidity of the sign then relies on data external to the photo and is meta-photographic.

"Theory aside, the thing that strikes me the most about this photo is its impersonality, the flat, one-dimensional lighting and the white limbo that surrounds the guitar—not a whiff of the life of a musician in sight.

"The presentation is impersonal and austere, probably given to the needs of publishing, where directional lighting could clash with other images in a layout and the white background allows it to blend on a white page with text. On another level, the anonymity of such a presentation (i.e. the most minimal of information needed to convey that this is Gilmour's guitar—i.e. no Gilmour) highlights the importance of Christie's imprimatur and the brand's seal of authenticity which provides the crucial piece of information—again such authentication is meta-photographic. So, I read the proposed sign not as 'Gilmour's guitar' but 'Christie's Gilmour Guitar.'"

Mike replies: Actually, I think the guitar itself resists becoming a sign...I've always been troublingly disappointed by souvenirs, and my beloved grandmother's treasured French wall cabinet, which hung in her bedroom for many years, and which I thought would be a way to hang on to her memory, is just a piece of old furniture in my house. A nice one, but the referent does not adhere. Enough.  :-)

John Camp: "I read the occasional guitar magazine and one had a feature on this sale at Christie's. The article said that these guitars often sell at ten to 20 times the official estimate. There are two segments of the guitar world interested in sales like these. The first is musicians, who would treasure a D-35 of this age if it's in good condition. They would buy it to play and it might sell for a couple of thousand dollars and maybe a couple of thousand more because of the Gilmour connection. The second group is collectors, who would value it for its Gilmour connection alone, and they are the guys who might take it to $200,000.

"I do think the best photos (and other artworks) stand alone, and I think the photographer's intent is usually quite plain in the best photos. There's no puzzle. There are not many of those photos, though. There is a second tier of photos as excellent in form and meaning as the first, but whose meaning may erode over time and eventually the work may no longer stand alone. The same is true of other art works.

"For example, Annie Leibovitz shot a famous photo of John Belushi standing alone and a bit tattered looking on the side of a highway, with the red taillights of a car that has just passed him, and apparently (though probably not really) the headlights of another car illuminating him. Given his career, and how he died (from wretched excess) I think that photo had a lot of meaning for a lot of people of his generation. But as recognition of that complex set of face/facts/culture begins to fade, so will the meaning of the photo for viewers.

Annie Leibovitz, John Belushi, Staten Island, New York, 1981

"The first tier photos, though, and I would include such things as Ansel Adams's 'Moonrise' and Paul Caponigro's 'Running White Deer' among them, won't fade as long as there is a moon and as long as there is wildlife. They are not only striking as objects in themselves, but they elicit an almost automatic response from sensitive viewers having to do with such universal things as death and nature. Even if we eventually succeed in killing all the deer, a memory of such things will stay with us, if only as memories (even as they do with ancient Egyptian wildlife paintings.) And the intent of the photographers couldn't be clearer, in my humble opinion."

Alex Mercado: "I used to photograph items for an auction house. It was the task of photographing these items that imbued the photographs with more meaning for me. The results were straightforward and rather unimposing; however my part in creating those catalog photographs are now part of their provenance. Here are two descriptive photographs I made that are quite memorable to me [one two]."

David Raboin: "I wish I had more time to write a proper comment.... After 11 years of reading TOP, this is my favorite post and my favorite featured comments. This blog is a treasure. Thanks Mike."

Mike replies: And thank you for signing up to be a Patreon contributor! Very kind of you.

Michael Perini: "Good representational photography like this is not as easy as it looks, and I have always been attracted to good examples. Early in my career I shot for catalogs, mostly low end, but some higher end—which led to advertising 'still lifes.' A collection from Christie's has lots of requirements, including no techniques that call attention to themselves, a similar look throughout, perfect color balance, and preservation of relative size. I've been drawn to this kind of photography ever since I saw Walker Evans' 'Beauties of the Common Tool' [Fortune magazine, July 1955 —Ed.]  and Bernice Abbot's scientific illustration where 'the idea was to interpret science sensibly, with good proportion, good balance and good lighting, so we could understand it.' A very enjoyable post."

Comments

[Keith]

My 2 cents. A photograph is a collection of light bouncing off something, usually but not always going through a lens system, to be captured by a sensor (which might be film or digital). In the digital world it is manipulated by software and displayed (at first) on a computer screen. In the film world it is manipulated by chemicals and more light. It might or might not resemble what a human would see. The photograph itself has zero meaning, it's the humans that look at it that imbue it with meaning. Trying to determine the photographer's intent or intended meaning is a mug's game.

[Jeff]

This relates to one of Winogrand’s most famous quotes, one that resonates with me: “I photograph to see what something looks like photographed” (that ironically, as the new documentary mentions, is not something he did much of after leaving New York).

[Bob Cook]

I owned a 1965 D-21 and a 1975 D-35. Two really undistinguished guitars I’ve owned. Martin was building so many guitars during that span that it was harder to find a good instrument than one with problems. The value of that instrument is certainly tied to the previous owner. Not unlike vintage cameras, perhaps?

[DavidB]

Knowing—or not knowing—the provenance of the guitar isn't that important. It's an excellent photograph of a beautiful guitar capable of making lovely music in the right hands. The photograph conveys that possibility.

[MikeR]

Adds to my appreciation of Wish You Were Here

[c.d.embrey]

Describe? You betcha Red Ryder. A photo is actual (existing or occurring at the time). Doesn't matter if it's a catalog shot, news or a portrait photo—it's what was in front of the lens at the instant the button was pushed.

Most photos have no significance. A portrait of someone I do not know tells me nothing—not about the person and not why it is being shown to me. Most photos are meaningless without captions telling the story.

[Omer]

Gary Winogrand’s definition/description of photography is amusing considering that many of his pictures are wonderfully surreal.

[Jeff]

I watched the documentary a second time, and consistent with Keith’s comment, Winogrand says (at 30:20) that “all a photograph describes is light on surface... that’s all there is... that’s all we see.”

[Steve Rosenblum]

In 1974 I sold my Gibson Hummingbird guitar and bought a new Martin D35. I had it until last year when I finally sold all my guitars because, sadly, I have been unable to play them for more than a decade due to severe arthritis involving my fingers. It was a beautiful guitar with beautiful tone, but not as much fun to play as the Hummingbird. I had lusted after a Martin for a long time, but after I bought it I felt the same way I did years later when I bought a Leica M6 and lenses, but didn't end up liking it as much as my Olympus OM gear.

I played it and sang several songs for my wife at our wedding in 1976--"Something in the Way She Moves" by James Taylor, and "Here, There, and Everywhere" by you know who. I have photos of myself playing those songs in which I can be seen wearing a tuxedo with tails that was cream colored with brown trim! Ah yes, the 70's.

I got what I thought was a fair amount of money for it when I sold it, but when I plugged the numbers in one of those online inflation calculators it showed that I had basically just kept up with inflation, and got the same money back as I put into it 35 years ago, plus I got to use it "for free" in the intervening years. Not being able to play guitar due to arthritis has been a hard adjustment for me--I still really miss it. I will hear some music on the radio and think "I can play that!" but, alas, I no longer can. So, that's what the photograph cued for me.

[Ben Rosengart]

@hugh crawford

I'm so pleased that you mentioned Matt Umanov. I lived on or near Bleecker St. for most of my life, and I bought my first-ever guitar from him in 1994. I still have it. (Pete Seeger played it once. It doesn't have much else to recommend it.) This year, I bought an electric guitar from Matt over the web, and we struck up a little email conversation.

When I sent him a photo of my 8-year-old son playing that aforementioned first guitar, he responded with a diptych of him and his tiny son playing guitar together, with the son and *his* son playing guitar together — and the two halves of the diptych looked almost identical, though you could tell they were from different eras of photography. Although a "mere" family snapshot, it was a finely observed piece of photo work. I appreciated it and I told him so.

[David Comdico]

Mike, the guitar is very much a sign for rock and roll and all that that implies (think of Hendrix and Prince's use of it as a phallic symbol). It is because the guitar already serves as a cultural sign that the Gilmore guitar can fetch tens (hundred's?) of thousands of dollars. The price doesn't reflect its intrinsic value; D35s are not especially rare objects. The extrinsic value is directly related to the guitar's status as a cultural symbol - i.e. a highly conventional sign.

It will be a sad day when Mike Campbell's guitars go up on the auction block and are consigned to a life of non-sound: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6g58e4

Guitar lovers should get a kick out of it.

[Francisco Cubas]

Wish you were here is still one of my favourite songs of all time. Never ceases to move me.

In this video you can see Gilmour playing the initial notes of the song with the famous guitar in his studio.

The interviewer is bad, but Gilmour is great, no-nonsense, straight. The interview is part of a series with all band members about Syd Barrett:

https://youtu.be/GlbeEebEdik?t=1529

[Speed]

The April 29th New Yorker has a photograph which is both expressive and descriptive.

Heading a piece by James Lasdun titled "Glow. Chasing the aurora borealis" is a photograph by Joakim Eskildsen.

The aurora often looks better in photographs. A camera on a tripod, set for a five-second exposuire, takes in far more light than the human eye does when it looks at something, and consequently it produces a more vivid image.

[Rob Campbell]

Thank you, Mike, for linking me to a video I can't access!

If I were a dog I'd bite your ankle. Hard. And deeply. Well, to the bone.

;-)

Rob

[Ernest Zarate]

I find Winogrand's definition of a photograph to be incredibly dense: "a photograph is...the illusion of a literal description of how a camera saw a piece of time and space."

A photograph is an illusion. An illusion of a description. Not real. A mirage. A deception. A pretense.

A photograph is not an actual, or real, or definitive, or absolute literal description. It is the illusion of those things - but it is not those things. It's smoke and mirrors. A sleight of hand. A snooker shot. A curve ball or sinker. It looks like one thing, then becomes another - sort of.

You're not looking at a young, mixed race couple carrying two chimpanzees in the zoo. It is an illusion of a description of what existed - and not existed. Who knows what the reality of that event may have been?

Even "fact-based" documents like the guitar photograph is misleading. How does one know for an absolute fact that the guitar in the photograph is the ONE? There is nothing within the frame to prove that. There is no evidence in the photograph to establish all the details the article attaches to that instrument.

Walker Evans may have said it best:

Interviewer: “Do you think it’s possible for the camera to lie?”
Walker Evans: “It certainly is. It almost always does.”

I'd remove the qualification.

Why? Because a photograph is an illusion. Of a literal description. Of how a CAMERA sees. A piece. Of TIME and SPACE.

[David Babsky]

I'd stopped posting comments here until I saw Hugh Crawford's comment that "..my wife bought a car from someone stopped at a red light in NYC. We were standing on a corner in SoHo and I said how much I loved Volvo station wagons, and one with a for sale sign stopped in front of where we were standing. NYC is like that."

On my first visit to NYC (1984?) from England I brought a little Aiwa pocket tape recorder, to record the sounds of New York for my son. I was on 23rd St. In the far, far distance I heard the wail of a police or fire wagon, so I switched on the recorder. The siren came closer, closer, then the fire truck turned into 23rd St and stopped right in front of me! There was a fire inside that building!

Yes, "..NYC is like that."

[Edward Bussa]

I'll echo that. This blog is a treasure.
Especially so for 'men who respond to good, clear "undesigned" forms'.

Ed.