Snake Oil

I was looking through my backfiles for something or other, and noticed this photograph, which was taken wandering along a little tributary stream of the Itchen a couple of years ago. If nothing else, it's quite nice... I especially like the tiny trout hatchlings chasing their own shadows in the greenish, sun-dappled water. Like most photographers of a certain disposition, I have happily spent my time looking for pictures like this, serendipitously extracting pleasing little bits of the world, rendered into the 2-D stillness of a rectangular frame. Or like this one, from the same month, April, in the same year, 2016, with the same camera, a Fuji X-E1:

They have a certain compositional, tonal, and textural similarity, and – insofar as any photographer can claim to put a personal stamp on their work – I'm happy to claim them, stylistically, as "mine". Were I ever to be invited to put on another photographic exhibition, pictures like this would figure prominently. As people seem never to tire of saying about other, similar work, it's all about "noticing the elusive, often surreal beauty that is revealed in the small, overlooked details in our everyday surroundings", and is a standing invitation to turn on, tune in, and – momentarily, at least – drop out of our habit-dulled perceptions. Blah blah, tum-ti-tum, and lah-di-dah. You read this sort of thing all the time, because there is an awful lot of other, similar work being made out there, and, in the end, you have to wonder whether, like landscape photography, it has finally become inextricably enmeshed in its own clichés. And, besides, exactly whose windows of perception are being given a wash-down, here?

I was looking at the online version of the TLS, which regularly features a Poem of the Week. This week it is by Anthony Thwaite, and (because the poem is nominally about a river) it is illustrated by a photo of broken, colourful reflections on rippled water. Seeing it, I immediately thought it must be by Jessica Backhaus, a moderately well-known German photographer who has published an entire book, I Wanted To See the World, of precisely such wave-fragmented imagery. Checking the credit, I saw that the picture was not by Backhaus, however, but sourced from the agency Alamy and by someone called Maria Galan, who turns out to be a stock-photography supplier. I imagine she saw some Backhaus-ish reflections somewhere, and thought it would be worth adding a few to her inventory. Why not? It's easy enough to do, once the idea is out there. Besides, it's no good being snobbish about someone trying to make a living from her photography.

But it does reveal something about the nature of photography, I think, that a journal like the TLS would be happy to source a nice-enough picture of some semi-abstract river-waves from Alamy to illustrate a poem (no doubt they have an account there) rather than use the work of an acknowledged artist of similar stature to the poet. After all, the only differences are pretty intangible: whereas someone like Jessica Backhaus, presumably, sees the broken imagery as expressive of some personal themes, and constructed her obsessive, book-length series out of a conviction that sequenced serial imagery can be greater than the sum of its parts, Maria Galan simply sees a gap in the stock-photo market. Same photo, different motive. It may be unfair, but I'm reminded of those bargain "Can You Tell The Difference?" LP compilations of current hits that were popular in the late 1960s, made by what we would now call tribute acts. For every innovator there are 100 imitators, and each imitator is followed by 1000 impersonators. Can you tell the difference? Does it make any difference who made two more-or-less identical pictures, with what motivation, and with what level of creative innovation?

To be clear, I don't mean to elevate Jessica Backhaus to that primary category. I own a couple of her books, which are nice enough, and have a story to tell, but are not essential. I'd place her in with the interesting imitators. But, having been reminded of her work, I decided to look her up on the Web, where I found this rather well-produced little video on her website. It's called "Wonder", a rather presumptuous title that says it all: yes, here we are, back in the presence of the same-old same-old, that "elusive, often surreal beauty that is revealed in the small, overlooked details in our everyday surroundings", which I have to admit I have begun to find quite depressing as a formula. Is this really what this approach to photography comes down to? A sort of wide-eyed evangelism for... Well, for what? Is there really a philosophical or political or religious significance to be derived from, say, noticing the play of light on a torn poster on a broken window? And does that alleged significance lie in the final photograph, or in the act of noticing itself, an act motivated by the desire to make photographs?

Perhaps we are all just recovering slackers making a virtue out of those lost hours spent idly gazing at walls and floors and out of windows. Or maybe we are aficionados of wabi sabi, aliens adrift in a world that is far too enchanted by the glossy and the new. Certainly, like me and a thousand others, in the video we see Backhaus gravitate to those shop-soiled environments where picturesque dilapidation can be found, producing pictures that could quite easily be mine, or those of just about any other photographer working in this free-floating lyrical genre that, as far as I'm aware, has no name. Which is to say they're good pictures, they're interesting, but not exceptional. That she appears to make a living from this work – she is represented by no fewer than eight galleries worldwide – is both mystifying and, I suppose, enviable. Which provokes the question: who buys such work at gallery prices when, with a little effort, they could just as easily be making it themselves?

Seriously: to believe otherwise is to invest in an illusion. The photographic boom of recent decades is a classic investment bubble. Anyone spending more than a couple of hundred pounds on a contemporary digital colour photograph is, in my opinion, a fool. Anyone asking over a thousand pounds for a single such photograph is, surely, a charlatan. Much as I love it, and depend on its practice for my sanity, photography is a secondary, mechanical, imitative art. The world will put on its photo-face whenever it is photographed, no matter who presses the button; it's simply a matter of learning how to use a camera to the same level of competence as, say, driving a car. The rest is choices. As a medium of record, photography is second to none. But photographs of puddles and broken glass that hint at (or challenge) some sort of immanence are not acts of witness to the world – here are the suffering children of Syria, here is the railway station before it was rebuilt, here is your great-great-grandmother –  but acts of personal testimony. Call me a hopeless old romantic, but selling non-transferable testimony by the yard and at top dollar smacks of snake oil to me.

I find myself coming back to my little manifesto, written some years ago:

Self-motivated photography is like writing poetry: if you are after fame and fortune, you are in the wrong game. You do it for its own sake, and the appreciation of a small, dedicated, statistically-insignificant audience, most of whom will be practitioners themselves. Even to be famous within such a small circle is to be invisible to the wider world. Martin Parr is as little-known to the general public as Paul Muldoon. But invisibility does have benefits: you're free from the expectations of paying audiences, so there's no excuse for your work not to be "as serious as your life" [jazz pianist McCoy Tyner on music] or even as daft as a brush, if that's what you prefer.

I might revise my example and estimation of Martin Parr, not least because his consummate skill in self-promotion seems to have imprisoned him, stylistically, within his own "brand" (although I have yet to hear anyone say to someone wielding a camera, "Who do you think you are: Martin Parr?", in the way people used to invoke David Bailey). I suppose I have also been surprised by the number of non-commercial "me, too" photographers who seem to have ridden the wave of the photo-boom (although I'd be curious to scrutinise the balance of incomings and outgoings in their bank accounts, not to mention their pension arrangements). But I stand by my basic proposition that the true value of whatever this kind of photography is – whether it be labelled self-motivated, lyrical, testimonial, poetic – lies in the doing of it, and the freedom to do it, and not in the final product.

Although, obviously, if you were to feel inclined to offer me a grand or two for any of my pictures, I'd be happy to oblige, even though (shhh...) seventy-five pounds is my normal asking price. PayPal is fine.