Lol Charles - clearly if you understand these musings, then you're very special
Bergson would recognise the processes you describe, un moment de decryptage, perhaps, an effervescence of l'élan vital, the intuitive substrate which motivates a photographer to seek out the world. To know it.
I understand your separation of 'image' and print; yes - the latter is separate, but why think in purely Cartesian terms, and not synthetic terms, in terms of the process of transformation, from the image to the print?
At the moment, playing with a Leica M6, I feel like I'm on a point of contradicting myself. I have achieved nothing with it so far. It has cost more than my LF kit, and my knowledge of it is probably greater in terms of tactile fondling yet nothing extends from this
With respect to photography and self-validation....I've spent most of my career shooting weddings. From that premise, you can see I never had much to speak of.
Listen to our friend:
je photographie pour me sentir aimer et souffrir. Je photographie pour me prouver que je suis vivant.
Perhaps he is more fortunate (and resolute?) than I am. He has found a means of discovery; of serendepity and knowing of oneself in the process of imaging. Think of it more than the camera as an extension of the eye, but the act of photographing, as an extension of the self.
I wasn't joking about my method: "this one sucks. Next - this one sucks. Next - this one might not suck so bad...". A process of forward stepping in self-validation, by taking one less step back. Feeling and rooting for a way to know what it is I try to express. My own method - self-validation, only takes place when I can doubt. Doubt what I do in clicking the shutter, clicking anyway, trying to make sense of it, doubting whether I ever capture anything that is meaningful at all. I guess I share more with Descartes than I would care to admit.
Our friend on the other hand, validates himself in the feeling of love and suffering, in capturing an essence - the essential in photography, which informs him of his existence.
And can essence precede the existence? Clearly for others in this mode, there seems no problem in making sense of photographie-en-soi rather than photographie-pour-soi. The self-validating photographer claims that photographie-pour-soi, when his eyes are alive to the world around him, reaps something existential for himself.
'Exploration or discovery of the self' is what teenagers do in dear diary affairs. At some point, there has to be a clarification of the level at which one tries to make sense of one's life on a philosophical level. That alone is relevant for the philosopher, or the reflecting agent that man can be.
Self-validation - a moment of beholding - when one is beholden, there is an aspect of one's awareness - call it 'awe' in which one is beholden before the world. In a moment like this, I am alive - and the circumstances - the relation with the visual presentiment brings me into this moment of beholding. That is the bit which precedes the click. The experience which brings me closer to recognising how good it is to be alive. And that precedes what is required of me as a photographer, to exercise in doubt, or self-assertion, that I had better get clicking and on to expressing this which I have been beholden by. So back to the question:
- why should the perception of many facets of the Grand Canyon improve my knowledge of my self?
Because it isn't the facets of the Grand Canyon which confer such knowledge to me. It is the fact that my perception experiences a Gestalt shift, one in which I am embodied in this experience, and thus beholden. Locked in, in visual relation, I just won't let go of such beauty.
Is that such a strange idea? I find it no different than the thought that it isn't how many different qualities of a friend's personality which improves self-knowledge or awareness. It is the love in the interaction, which enables one to become beholden to another.
In any case, analytical philosophy is not the tendency of the British photographer, as the French forum thread demonstrates. Your thoughts on travel photography resonate with mine: there is freedom when one's photographic work is not contrived by a theme too.
