No Photos

Photography is a civilizational wrong turn. It's a psychological dead end. It's a cheap bailing bucket that hollows out the human personality, the meaningful moments and the great sights.

I don’t care for photography. I appreciate that there are good and bad photographs. My wife and my cousin are both talented photographers. As an art, a technology and an activity, however, I don’t care for it. I fully expect to lose some of you here. But hear me out.

My wife and I argue about it sometimes. When we first moved in together, we negotiated a deal where she wouldn’t hang up any photos if I agreed not to hang up any of my paintings. Years later, the detente stands.

Not how things look

Photographs are not how things look. Things are always moving. And what you actually see is not the sum of your visible field. It’s directly connected to motion, sound, the refocusing of your eyes based on desire and fear, and the reinterpretation of visual stimulus based on where you understand yourself to be.

Of course, the photo will say, see, you’re wrong. Maybe it’s right. But it’s right in a way that usually doesn’t help. It’s right in a way that aggressively takes 90% of visual experience off the table.

Dead viewers for dead images

Go look at a picture - a painting or even a photograph. When you do, your eyes move around, probably running to the scary or erotic part first, then into the adjacent interesting sections, and finally to the flatter surfaces, maybe pulling back to take in the whole composition, before going back into a part they missed.

A camera only has one very stationary eye. You may set the parameters - lens aperture, depth of field, shutter speed and the like. But it’s not like looking, which is always responsive, always at play.

When we try to look like a camera looks, we have to stifle our own playfulness. We have to suppress our own personality.

Unemployed illustrators

A painting or a sketch may be inaccurate compared with a photograph. But at least you can sense why it’s wrong, and perhaps relate. It’s closer to a conversation. It delivers a world in which people belong.

The camera was the AI of its day. It did what today’s grimy dreamers hope AI will do. Namely, photography more or less destroyed an entire creative, dignified and fairly noble profession. But it destroyed a lot more than that.

Reality envy

Photographs say this is what’s real, not your own experience, with its D-list cast and low production values.

Oh shit - how can you catch up? How can you get in the game? How can you even exist? Simple, take a photograph of yourself.

The more time you spend with images, the more you need to make your experience into an image for it to actually exist, and the more you need to make yourself into an image. It’s an ever-telescoping pursuit of a reality that’s never realized.

Put it on the card

The camera encourages a kind of absenteeism. The camera is there so you don’t need the wherewithal to meet the present moment. Rather, you can take a picture, and look at it later. In museums, you sometimes see people jogging through the galleries with their cameras raised, looting their own lives for later.

It’s like a credit card. Sure, go crazy - it’s vacation, just put it on the card. The idea is that you’ll pay it off when you get back home. You can look at the pictures back home, where you’ve really honed your ability to pay no attention. But I don’t think people do look at the pictures when they get home. I think it all goes from lens to server to probably oblivion. The photographers themselves never really see it.

Fuck the Grand Canyon

The other night I was talking with some friends who had plans to go out West. And I started badmouthing the Grand Canyon. Sure, it’s grand, and a canyon, but what else? You take a few snaps and get back in your car. Great. Maybe in the days before twenty-story buildings, that sort of sudden vertical drop was impressive, or so I argued.

The next day, my wife suggested I apologize to them. I guess I had been a bit severe about the grandeur of the canyon. But I think one reason that I got so little out of the Grand Canyon was that I’d seen so many photographs of it that I reflexively treated the entire actual thing as a photograph. I collected the experience and shoved it with the rest.

The entire Grand Canyon had been pre-nullified before I got there, like the Eiffel Tower, the Hollywood sign or even sometimes the sublime Brooklyn Bridge. I only walk over that bridge if it’s raining or bitter cold. Otherwise, I want to scream at the tourists who are stopping foot traffic to take one of the same five photos over and over - why not just buy a postcard and be done with it?

In other words, why continue pretending to exist, if you’re not really existing? This phony existence rubs off from highly photographed places. The Taj mahal looks lovely, but I never want to go. It’s been pre-nullified. When I went to the Grand Canyon, that nullification of both the place and myself was my whole experience. That’s probably why I got so angry. That probably should have been part of my apology.

Photos on the mantle

Desperation is always the star of a posed photograph. It’s not just because you have to stand still and smile. There’s an underlying uneasiness, as if people need to prove that these things have actually happened. But by forcing the issue with photographs, they only intensify the doubt that these things are happening at all.

Cameras in the news stand, and in heaven

Thirty Fourth Street in Manhattan is busy, chewed-up and full of rough characters going through things most of us can only hope to never understand.

Newsstands still mark the corners of Thirty Fourth Street, though they no longer sell newspapers or magazines. They’re steel closets selling gum, umbrellas, phone chargers and drinks. The proprietor inside has nowhere to escape to, no place to hide. I walked past one the other day that had four separate cameras pointed at the patch of sidewalk where a customer or robber would stand.

Relatedly, I promise, is a moment from a movie, called The Lovely Bones. At one point a pair of dead teenage girls are cavorting through a happy afterlife, where they can do whatever they please. At one point in the afterlife, they take photographs of each other, and laugh. According to the movie, taking photos is just what people would do if they could do absolutely anything at all.

The oddness of the moment reminded me that photos aren’t always the point of photography. It’s often the camera.

Cameras say things. Some cameras say, this will be fun to remember far in the future or they say you will be famous. Allen Ginsberg carried a camera a lot of the time, in part to say, what you and I are doing is very important, possibly historic. The cameras of the paparazzi say you are overpoweringly attractive right now, but also, we intend to devour you and pick the bones clean.

But this other kind of camera perched above newsstands and bank lobbies says, what you do will follow you, but likely never to your benefit, something akin to: anything you appear to be or do will be used against you.

That’s a hell of a thing to be told, apropos of nothing, every single day, every place you go. Another reason I dislike photography. And you might say but the cameras keep us safe. But then you’re a person who can only be kept safe by a million cameras trained on nearly every public space. That doesn’t sound like a fun person to be.

The precedent

Someone shows you a picture of a flower. It's recognizable, but missing the smell, along with some odd detail that only becomes briefly visible through a trick of the light when you put it in a vase.

Someone points to the picture and says that's a flower and you nod. It's a small abdication of judgment. And I'm not saying you should've done differently. But it sets a precedent. You grant permission to an authority. It’s a permission and so miniscule to an authority so subtle that you can't even remember granting it.

You only remember agreeing to that kind of thing. You only remember that's what you do - agree. A photo is a small thing, and famously hard to disagree with.

What’s been done

Whenever I look at a photo collage, the main impression I get is of the creator saying look what's been done to my mind. It's an art form that attacks while pleading for pity.

Time Life

To argue against photography feels like arguing against everything from the criminal justice system to the scientific method to membership in society itself. This is especially true in the USA, where photography has been integral to the American Century, and whatever we have of a national identity.

For several years, I worked at Time Inc. starting when it sold off its historical headquarters in the Time Life Building to after it lost even its name. For almost a century, its magazines - Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, People and so forth - girdled the imaginations of the nation and blithely inculcated a shared culture across a vast landmass, primarily through the use of a steady flow of compelling photographs.

In business schools, they may teach Time Life as the cautionary tale of a media empire that missed major opportunities and lost it all. But working there, it’s easy to see what went wrong. They created, with lush and irrefutable photography, an entire world that was convincing and sensible enough that it looked like it would last forever. Then they got high on their own supply.

A worse tunnel? Or light?

Like everything else, photography is under siege from computers