A Visual Feast

I am finished with the reading of our text for the “History of Photography” course I’m taking through Foothill College online. Mary Warner Marien’s Photography: a Cultural History(1) provides a veritable visual feast of images along with instructions on how to consume them. The kaleidoscope of imaginative images that I first experienced as overwhelming (see “I am already overwhelmed”) has turned into a sumptuous banquet that delights the senses and soothes the soul. Once I learned how to modulate my episodes of exposure, I was able to savor each tidbit without gorging or gagging. This was quite a feat! Marien presents image after arresting image in a cornucopia fashion that was initially very frustrating. It was too much to take in! It was impossible to digest and to incorporate. Finally, I simply closed the book, and waited. In fact, I think I took a whole month’s vacation from reading the text! Now I’m back, and I have finished with the reading of it. And, I’m ready to critique it.

I have been fascinated by photos for as long as I can remember. My father was a photographer in his early years, and my mother faithfully re-produced his voluminous outpouring of images in albums that I treasure. My most memorable image of my father as photographer is when we were on vacation. Dad was not uncommonly covered with a black-and-white camera on the right shoulder, a color-film-camera on his left shoulder, and holding a movie camera in between. As kids, we often had to pose for not one, not two, but perhaps THREE re-enactments of episodes on our travels. At family celebrations, such as Christmas or Thanksgiving or Easter, we had to sit through the elaborate process of setting up the flood lamps before we could eat our meal or open our presents. When family guests came for dinner, we often as not finished the meal with a trek to the living room to view Dad’s latest version of slides or movies. In other words, photography for me is an integral part of our family’s daily life. And I loved it!

As a professor of agricultural economics, Dad often as not had a purpose to many of his photographs that eluded us. In fact, we were often as not thoroughly unappreciative. “Not another butcher’s shop!” we pleaded in Italy. “Don’t you already have a million pictures of the corn fields of Kansas?” we asked as we stopped one more time by the side of the road as Dad made a carefully-constructed record of how the crops are doing this year, in this place, at this time. Little did he know that this would come back to haunt him, in a most peculiar fashion. I, the daughter, have turned into a caricature of his artistic and professional pursuits. He calls me the paparazzi. He groans when I appear with my camera, and he grimaces with every photograph of him that I take. He is NOT amused! He is irritated by this constant pursuit of images, this obsessive wish to record life’s little moments. And he is most annoyed by the interference with mealtime! When the table’s set, and the company is seated, he’s ready to get on with the REAL business at hand! He does NOT want to pose for another picture!!!!

In light of this, it is a real joy and inspiration to read Marien’s tour-de-force that evaluates photography, and places it in the scheme of things. After all, I need some philosophical ammo with which to defend myself! I cannot face my father’s wrath and his squirms and glowering without an ideological point of view. And she has given me one. Rather, she’s given me dozens. Just as my mother Marian is so often the mediator in our family, so can Mary Warner Marien serve as a mediating force between my father and me. For Marien shows that photography has a long and variegated history. It is not all-of-one-thing. There is as much room in this world for the professionals, like my father, as for the amateurs, like me. In the history book of life, we will all get a chapter, or a paragraph, or at least some prose or a verse. Furthermore, one photographer can not be seen without seeing afterimages of another. Bill Owens’ images of Suburbia hearken back to the “visual sociology of the F.S.A. photographs” which he admired(2). Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man, which thoroughly entranced me growing up, was totally trounced by many photographers and critics. And ordinary images such as Parents by Wang Jinsong’s 1998 production of composite pictures(3), can have extraordinary meanings (and that word is purposefully plural!).

In other words, it’s ok that my father hates the work that I do, and the way that I do it! And it’s ok that I am an irritant to others in my pursuit of an oftentimes unknown (to me) or unknowable (to you) purpose. When all is said and done, photography IS. It IS part of our lives in the 21st Century, and it IS as varied and as virtuous or not as we make it. Therefore, I can gain genuine substance from this feast of images, and this densely-packed panorama of visual delights. I can be sustained by it as I strive to match the masters, and I can be supported by it as I withstand the onslaughts of others. To be a photographer is anyone’s right, and to follow one’s way is everyone’s duty.

Alas, I cannot say that my father will fare so well. His daughter is now armed with intellectual armor that will enable her to withstand his barbs, and to overlook his scowls. For now I know that the photographer-that-I-am is as legitimate as any other. I can’t explain why I want to photograph every inch of my father’s house, every relic of my mother’s boudoir, and every instance of our family’s interactions. All I can say is this: it is IN me to DO so! I have been born and bred a photographer, just as much as I am a writer. I have been fed a diet of images, and seen a surfeit of situations in which photography is IMPORTANT. It’s not just the big events that deserve to be memorialized. It’s the littlest detail that may matter years down the road. As I sit and leaf through the albums my mother so carefully constructed for each of her three children, I marvel at what a precious gift it is. From my father the photographer and my mother the collator and critic, the mediator and the memorializer, they have given this gift to me. I have a handle on my past that many would die for. I have a tool for my daily doings that gives me purpose and pleasure. And I have a passion for the future that no college degree or corporate job or socially-sanctioned lifestyle could ever match. I may be just a snap-shot shooter, but I’m a photographer, nonetheless. And that’s what counts. For long after my parents pass away, I will have their images, and their genealogy, and their letters and recipes and WHATNOT, from which I, their daughter, can make sense of the world they’ve given to me. And I thank them, with every photograph that I take. I thank them, with every effort I make. For I not only give them a digitalized life, but I enliven the life they’ve given to me. Amen.

1. Photography, a Cultural History, by Mary Warner Marien, Prentice Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2002
2. Ibid, 358
3. Ibid, 447

Written: March 19, 2006