what if...

...someone made an IQ atlas of the world?

would we like the results? would we want to know? would our fears be confirmed? or would we be amazed? is ignorance really bliss?

i'm imagining one in my brain and it actually looks quite beautiful.

out of tension comes meaning

it seems my little ditty yesterday about documentary photography struck a cord with some (thank you all for your comments). and thanks to your comments, i've had a chance to think some more on the half-thought thoughts i threw out there.

i want to start by saying that i, in no way, was saying (or even thinking) that my iPhone photo of a photo in a museum was in the least bit an example of documentary photography. what i like about it (and the one above), is seeing my own reflection in the photo. it underlines for me the way in which i feel i participate in an exhibition (or really, most things) by placing myself somehow there. participating. active. part of it. that i chose these documentary photos of russian women to take my iPhone photo in underlines another interesting thing (for me, anyway) - that the ones i wanted to identify with were the photos of russians, not of norwegians or gypsies or rwandans (which were also represented in the exhibition). i guess it was these to which i could most relate. either that or the reflection was best there and i could see myself most clearly. which is also a potentially interesting statement.

ASIDE: can i say that I DESPISE blogging from a PC and IE6? who is still using IE6, you ask? morons. why is this stupid thing hopping up to the top all the time? ARRGH! deep breath. and now back to the regularly scheduled blog...

and to a huge extent, i agree with bill that many of the photos on blogs, while documenting everyday life in many instances, are not documentary photography. and it has to do with what he said about there not really being that much of the less-than-perfect. i know that aside from iPhone photos, i don't really share with all of you the ones that didn't turn out or which were from the wrong angle or where i had the settings all wrong. we try to show our best here in the blogosphere. and that's not really that real. documentary photography is raw and almost painful in its realness.

i guess what i was wondering about blog photos and frankly blogs in general, is whether they will be data worthy of study by future historians and sociologists, in the way that walker evans' photos evoke the depression like no one else can. i saw the photo of allie mae burroughs that redhead riter mentioned and i have to admit i was transported instantly into a steinbeck novel. i suspect what we're doing out here is more ephemeral, less dense with meaning (yet i continue to try to find meaning in it, like some obsessed maniac).

and the debate made me think about a whole style of photos on blogs that has arisen out of the 3191 project. a sort of naturally-lit, slightly lonesome but rather poetic and a bit wistful photography of mundane breakfast crumbs on a plate. because there's a lot of that out there. and i'm guilty of it myself. but honestly, i don't think it will last. not like walker evans. but i do think it captures the ennui of this present moment and that's something. i don't think that in the diptychs there's enough tension between the photos to hold greater, lasting meaning. because true meaning needs tension of some sort, doesn't it?

of course, a growing disdain for such diptych projects hasn't stopped me from wanting one myself. so we started across ø/öresund, which i share with kristina, where we do photos of life in denmark and life in sweden (and which i love and look forward to and enjoy collaborating on).  i'm not sure we are always beyond wistful breakfast crumbs (i do adore a good macro, after all), but i'd like to think that over time it will show that we have captured something of the contrasts and similarities of the two countries in which we reside, so near and yet so far from one another. and for the first time, i think that i'm willing to watch and let something develop and only later see what it really is. and that's something, at least for me personally. and speaking of kristina, i would say that of the blog photographers i know, some of her photos come closest to a documentary photography spirit.

my own photos probably never will mostly because i have a hard time letting them speak for themselves. that's why i've pushed myself to do wordless wednesdays, in an effort to try to let the photos speak and not try to pile words and meaning onto absolutely everything. that and i really don't like taking pictures of people all that much. rocks and leaves just sit still so much better and they never get impatient with you and tell you to hurry up and snap it already or yell at you for taking their picture without their permission.

but, i thank you all for your thoughts and for the polemic. it provoked a whole lot more thinking on my part and it's less a half-thought thought now and more of a two-thirds thought thought. but, as i said, out of tension comes meaning.

edited: sorry for all the stupid errors that were in this one...but on that stupid PC, it kept jumping back to the top and i clearly lost my place several times...sigh. another reason to love macs. and safari. but that's a whole 'nother post, isn't it?

documentary photography

i learned something yesterday on my usual wednesday afternoon trip to the henie onstad art center (i'm going to miss that place). they had a new exhibition up of contemporary norwegian documentary photography. the photos were all recent ones by norwegian photographers. mentioned in the notes on several of the photos were that they harkened to the traditions of american documentary photographer walker evans (1903-1975) and german august sander (1876-1964) and i intend to look into their work a bit and learn more. i suppose another name for documentary photography is journalistic photography, but it's about depicting snapshots of life as it is. and i suppose it's where the notion that a picture is worth 1000 words came from.

most of the photographers in the exhibition had little interaction with their subjects, they just tried to capture moments without interference, but there were several where they had posed the subjects. one of those is above, where a russian woman is posed on a train (the trans-siberian railroad, to be exact), tho' she is, in a sense, posed in her natural habitat. i had to snap it with my iPhone and i love how my own reflection is visible in the photo, which for me, further underlines the documentary nature of the piece...me documenting myself seeing the documentary photograph. that strikes me as powerful on some level, tho' i'm not sure that at the moment i can explain it. it somehow shows how the things we see, especially something like an exhibition, which is intentional on every level, creep into our own topography and become part of us in what we take away.

i think blogging goes well with documentary photography and many of us are amateur documentary photographers, showing our daily lives and the topographies (there's that word again, but it's on my mind of late) of our lives. maybe contours would have been better, but i love the notion of mapping inherent in the word topography. i wonder if blogs will be future source material for sociologists or historians looking at historical moments? or are they so ephemeral, they will just fade away? interesting thoughts to ponder on a grey and dark northern day.