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Educator Philip Perkis & Teaching Photography: Notes Assembled

NOVEMBER 1, 2005

"Photography as the cause of the downfall of western civilization"

In his essay The Human Universe, Charles Olsen postulates that since the Greeks, our system of language has become more and more about description and concept of intellect and has lost its ability to express experience directly.

When Diane Arbus committed suicide in 1971 (that her death was suicide is relevant because her life then took on a quality of legend), the museum of modern art in New York mounted a large retrospective exhibition of her photographs. It was the most highly attended show in the museum’s history. A large percentage of the work concerned itself with photographs of people ‘on the fringe.’

She had the ability to photograph ordinary people and create a feeling of alienation and strangeness in the picture. Perhaps we photograph to find reflection of inner emotional qualities (another way of looking at Steiglitz’s concept of equivalence?)

I spent some time hanging around at the show because I never felt that her work was that important or profound as to warrant the attention it was getting. I wanted to find out why this was so.

A lot of viewers seemed to be conventional sorts, not people of the ‘avant-garde,’ and certainly few ‘outsiders.’

Over many visits, I heard some variation of, ‘O, I’m so glad I don’t have to meet that person,’ several dozen times as least.

I began to understand something. Photography provides a window through which we can see things that we fear or do not want to have contact6 with directly. It’s not just about seeing things that are not available or no longer exist such as Abraham Lincoln or the Hidnenberg.

A noteworthy industry of the mid-to-late19th century was the ‘photographic freak show.’ Nadar was doing it back in the 1840s with his gender bending nudes, and later Muybridge, with his ‘scientific’ studies of naked people doing all kinds of things, not to mention exposed breasts, and bones through noses, as well as dozens of albums of freaks and diseases that were produced as ‘scientific’ studies. Robert Mapplethorpe and Larry Clark are not new.

The year 1839 then, simply bench marks the technology that allows for the ability to fix on a surface the lens or monocular vision that had been used in painting, drawing and printmaking for the previous several hundred years. That’s when the separation began. If one accepts the ideas that the development of ‘realism’ in art encouraged the separation from direct experience in a similar way that the development of Westerrn language to some degree prevents people from the direct expression of sensation then an idea is starting to develop.

If we start with the phenomenon of realism in painting and then add the pervasive and ubiquitous presence and power of photography, film and video, we can see how they have had an enormous and profound effect on the psyche of people. The direction of this shift has encouraged us to relate to each other in an increasingly less direct manner. It has altered every aspect of our lives-and not always in a positive way. It has allowed and encouraged people to experience many more things vicariously. Most people have never actually seen a person being shot to death, and yet there are over 1200 deaths by guns shown on television everyday.

If I look at painting and drawing before artists began to use the lens as an aid with the camera obscura and camera lucida, it is abundantly clear that the function of visual art was other than to create the illusion of reality. To say that the invention of monocular vision and perspective and its use in artworks is an ‘improvement’ over less intelligent efforts that preceded it is ridiculous, even possibly chauvinistic.

This is not to suggest that the inventors of this system were guilty of anything. It is what this system has come to signify in relation to culture and how we define it.

Perhaps it may have something to do with Western Europeans having seen themselves as being the center or model of what a civilized pole should be, everything else being a bit ‘primitive’ or at least peripheral.

There is nothing original in suggesting that the function of art is in the area of expressing and transmitting a certain quality of n=knowledge that cannot be expressed using ordinary discourse.

The only possible reason for writing a poem is that what is being spoken of cannot be expressed using prose for.

If I sit in a museum and look at a carpet made in Central Asia, it is clear that this object is not simply decorative. There are levels of meaning and value that are beyond my rational mind to comprehend. If, however, I sit for a while and open myself up to just looking without trying to figure out meaning as though it were an arithmetic problem, than something can take place in me that is at once subtle, profound and most importantly, not translatable into language. Once can write and speak about the taste of vanilla with the intelligence and eloquence of the best wordsmith; I still don’t know the taste of vanilla. But if I hear and read these descriptions, and then taste vanilla for the first time, I might say ‘of course.’ This can be equally true of visiting the Grand Canyon or viewing a work of art for the first time.

The question, of course, remains as to whether the technology drives social, psychological and cultural changes, or does the psyche create a vacuum, which a technology is created to fill. It seems to me that the question has no definitive answer, but the relationship is fascinating and always worth looking at.

Philip Perkis: Images

Philip Perkis (born Boston, MA 1935) has taught at a number of institutions and workshops including as Photography Chair at Pratt Institute and part of the graduate faculty at School of Visual Arts and Tisch, NYU. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, NEA and CAPS grant recipient, and his work is represented in many museums and collections. Other books include "Warwick Mountain Series", Nexus Press.