Phototrope: All story

Photography, for me, has always been about story. Has always been about placing markers in my mind to which to later return. It was, long ago, about obsessing over the mechanics of process and geekery, the zone system, about perfect black and white saturation and gradients. But that period was short. And throughout the years, I’ve found myself returning to — with each tick of my photographic journey, each incremental tick of technology — the story. The who, what, when, where, why, and how of the thing before the lens. And how capturing that image would inform some future version of my self, or, god willing, something larger.

Avedon

Clarence Lippard, the drifter © Richard Avedon

I return again and again to Avedon’s portraits, not because they’re beautifully exposed (though they are) or because he used large format film, but because within each face lives branched lives, alternate universes. And I get lost in those universes. They speak to me, are full of myth — pull me in and demand attention like a bracing short story.

But the most poignant or moving, certainly most intimate, of all of Richard’s images are those of his father. Made more powerful because of the following letter and story accompanying them:

Dear Dad, I’m putting this in a letter because phone calls have a way of disappearing in the whatever it is. I’m trying to put into words what I feel most deeply, not just about you, but about my work and the years of undefinable father and son between us. I’ve never understood why I’ve saved the best that’s in me for strangers like Stravinsky and not for my own father. There was a picture of you on the piano that I saw every day when I was growing up. It was by the Bachrach studio and heavily retouched and we all used to call it “Smilin’ Jack Avedon”—it was a family joke, because it was a photograph of a man we never saw, and of a man I never knew. Years later, Bachrach did an advertisement with me—Richard Avedon, Photographer—as a subject. Their photograph of me was the same as the photograph of you. We were up on the same piano, where neither of us had ever lived. I am trying to do something else. When you pose for a photograph, it’s behind a smile that isn’t yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people. I want your intensity to pass into me, go through the camera and become a recognition to a stranger. I love your ambition and your capacity for disappointment, and that’s still as alive in you as it has ever been. Do you remember you tried to show me how to ride a bicycle, when I was nine years old? You had come up to New Hampshire for the weekend, I think, in the summer when we were there on vacation, and you were wearing your business suit. You were showing me how to ride a bike, and you fell and I saw your face then. I remember the expression on your face when you fell. I had my box Brownie with me, and I took the picture. I’m not making myself clear. Do you understand? Love, Dick

Jacob Isreal Avedon © Richard Avedon

Hosoe

Yukio Mishima, © Eikoh Hosoe

I return to Hosoe and his portraits of Mishima. To be privy to such an intimate relationship with that powerful, complicated artist, and then share with us that access is truly a gift. The fact that the images were beautifully exposed and black and white is secondary to that greater story. And, indeed, it's atop that greater story on which these images live and die.

Toledano

Phil and his dad, © Phil Toledano

I return to Phil Toledano and the images of his father.[6] They bring me back to my own images of my late grandmother, shot with some random medium format device I borrowed from a friend, in my attempt to capture the last few moments of her life as she was pulled under and made increasingly incoherent by the dark tide of Parkinson’s Disease.

In those moments the machine did not matter one bit. And I am grateful — indeed, I owe so much — to those images for helping me and my family better understand just what was happening, however fleeting, inside of a mind made impenetrable by disease.

My late grandparents

This is my lens: Moments, memory, story, beauty. Basically in that order. Humor is also in there, above beauty. Beauty has some intrinsic value, but, in my opinion, beauty shrouded in thin story is not worth as much as great story encased in the dregs of the world.[7] Story, for me, gives purpose to the beauty.

This is why Cartier-Bresson can take blurry masterpieces (although this was greatly, hilariously, mortifyingly debated by the Flickr community) — because they are first and foremost story or documentation, and secondly technical achievement.

© Cartier-Bresson

The shift to a smartphone for photography scares me because I love the boxes. Love their purpose. Their simplicity. So dearly love knowing I’ve captured all that detail. Love their constraints and all the potential packed within them. But in the end, for me, photography has never been about a box. The box was always a means.