White-Out

Clutter? What clutter? I've just tidied up!

Have you come across this ridiculous person (I can't even be bothered to look up her name, she's some kind of self-styled "de-cluttering" guru) who has claimed recently that nobody needs to keep more than thirty books? THIRTY?? Surely a zero or two have gone missing there? It's all a bit King Lear, to my mind: you know, the scene where the Ugly Sisters try to persuade him that keeping his own retinue of 100 knights is terribly inconvenient for them and, you know, really, what is the point, father? Here's a reminder:

GONERIL:
Hear me, my lord;
What need you five and twenty, ten, or five,
To follow in a house where twice so many
Have a command to tend you?
REGAN:
What need one?
KING LEAR:
O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life's as cheap as beast's: thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need,--
You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!
Act 2 Scene 4

Reason not the need, indeed... And for goodness sake put a jumper on, missy! Is it just me, or is there quite a draught in this castle?

That said, I have been trying to keep my book-buying under control, and in particular my photo-book addiction. Like any recovering addict, I really shouldn't be touching the stuff, but one or two now and then can't hurt, surely, can it? Not least because I believe in supporting the photographers I admire by buying their books. I can't afford to buy their actual prints and, even if I could, I'm sure buying prints would pose a far greater domestic "clutter" problem than any amount of books. As with paintings, you need wealth but, above all, space in abundance to collect original art. One of the many wonderful things about books is the fact that there's no doubt about the best way to store them, although I concede that "in tottering piles on the staircase" is not it. It's also a curious fact that a great many photographs look far better presented in a book than either hung on a wall or fumbled from a portfolio. Quite apart from all the advantages of juxtaposition and thoughtful sequencing that a serial succession of pages offers (with random access thrown in, should you prefer that), the threesome of photograph, printer's ink, and book-quality paper is a very happy one. Although, obviously, the gigantism of recent years is not well served by any book smaller than an actual coffee table.

However, it's another fact – a sad one, but, for us addicts, quite helpful – that the glory days of the photo-book, like those of pop and rock, have passed. Sure, there are more being published than ever, and to a far higher production standard, but the parallel with pop is instructive. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones had put in their 10,000 hours before cutting their first singles, recorded on wax cylinders (or whatever the technology was), in studios equipped with nothing much more than a glass booth to muffle the engineer's cries of despair and a pair of scissors. They then went on to change the world as we had known it. Today, some kid will go straight from his bedroom to fifteen minutes of pointless but remunerative global domination on the strength of two decent songs, a nice face, and a voice that can be straightened out in a studio where he is little more than a flavour to be tweaked and added into the mix. Similarly, too many young photographers, with their half-baked, fashion-forward, art-school projects, are going straight to publication, as if that were Stage One of a career – the equivalent of sleeping in the van and endlessly touring small clubs – rather than one of its major peaks. There's no opportunity to learn anything much that way, beyond what a mistake it was to blow grandad's legacy on a vanity project. I was depressed, looking through an online photo-book seller's January "on sale" list (come on, don't you mean "remaindered"?) to see how many of the hyped hot items of the last few years have failed to sell. Unsurprisingly: even at a tenner each, I wouldn't buy any of them.

Nonetheless, I continue to have a loyalty to certain veterans I have been following since the 1980s, prominent among whom is Thomas Joshua Cooper. As with Jem Southam, I will buy anything he publishes, sight unseen, and have never regretted it. I've mentioned TJC several times in this blog, and I wrote a piece in 2017 for the online magazine On Landscape which described a workshop I did with him in 1991 at Duckspool. He is a remarkable man, by any measure, producing remarkable work in remarkable circumstances. He was recently persuaded to give a session at the annual "Meeting of Minds" conference organised by On Landscape, and this event was videoed and generously made available on YouTube. You can see it here. Go on, I urge you to watch it, I can wait. It's not short – about 90 minutes, in fact – but if you have a serious interest in photography, art, long-term projects, landscape, geography, adventure, or even just enjoy the intersection of swearing and scholarship, then this is essential viewing.

Meanwhile, here is an utterly inconsequential photograph of one of the lovely 1930s leaded windows in our house:

Back? I hope you agree it was worth it. He does go on a bit, I know, and, despite his many years in Glasgow, has that curious American academic/artistic habit of assuming (or pretending to assume) a British audience must be aware of this, that, or the other piece of cultural arcana. Oh yeah, we do all that stuff in school, mate... I also think a skeptical person would be justified in wondering quite how many times an 1898 Agfa-Ansco view camera on a tripod (never mind an ageing human being) can really survive repeated swampings by unexpected waves, or tumbles into the sea, or down crevasses; the "weather-proofing" on those things being about on a par with an orange-crate. Or, indeed, why anyone would consider it worth the risk of being shot by third-world border guards or tortured to death by drug-smugglers in order to secure a photograph – and just one photograph! – from precisely the right spot on some godforsaken promontory with a name like For Fuck's Sake Point on Keelhaul Bay. But I believe every word; the man is cut from the same mad cloth as the guy who just had to climb the sheer faces of El Capitan and Sendero Luminoso without ropes. Or, indeed, film-maker Werner Herzog.

But the sheer improbability of Cooper's quest raises an interesting question, I think. What if – just what if – the whole Atlantic Basin project was a complete hoax? What if all those evocative photographs of rocky shores and breaking waves and misty horizons were actually made in, say, the Hebrides during holidays with the family? It's a pretty varied geography up there, the weather changes every ten minutes, and you can face out to sea in pretty much any direction you like. It could be done. What's more, if your claim is to have photographed from a place where only nine other people (or even no other people) have ever stood, what possible contradictory evidence could there be? As far as I know, even the very latest sheet film has no GPS functionality. So, what difference would it make, if the whole enterprise was shown, on completion, to be one enormous, slow time, conceptual-art put-on? That, far from hitching rides to the North Pole with Russian ice-breakers, Cooper had been marking student assignments in his Glasgow office, with the central heating turned up to max? Would the photographs lose all value, like the currency of a country that has ceased to exist, or would they still retain an aesthetic charge, like the prettier, collectable, high-denomination notes of that obsolete currency?

It's an outrageous question, obviously (and one I have no intention of answering), but it goes to the heart of the eternal debate between "photograph as document" vs. "photograph as autonomous art object". Cooper's work has always shown an intriguing oscillation between the two. From the early work like Between Dark and Dark or Dreaming the Gokstadt to the current Atlantic Basin "Atlas" magnum opus, the captions and texts have always played an important role, being both both highly specific as to location, but also always gesturing towards an image's place in a well-defined series, as well as to certain highly personal mini-genres spread across all his projects (such as "premonitional works"). Somewhat paradoxically, you might think, here we have fine art prints made to the very highest standards (Cooper is a master printer) presenting a very conceptual thesis about a direct engagement with geographical extremity (literally, it seems: you can download his "PhD by Publication" at Glasgow School of Art here). It's an unusual mix. If one were looking for parallel contemporary enterprises, I suppose the work of Sally Mann or Raymond Meeks would come to mind.

In a way, I think trust is the key. In that videoed Meeting of Minds session, the story behind the photograph "Polar White-Out" is crucial (at: 1h 22m 43s). How far do we trust Cooper, when he describes feeling the desperate urge to photograph, on day 13 of an Antarctic snowstorm severe enough to confine everyone to their tents and sleeping bags for 23 days? Can we accept that, with the aid of seven others – three to hold the tripod, three to hold Cooper, one to hold the darkcloth according to the video; three on the tripod, three on the camera, one on Cooper according to the thesis – he ventured out into a horizontal blizzard to record what turned out to be a blank white image, slightly vignetted at the corners? An image that could have been made anywhere in front of any blank white wall? Of course we can. We have to: the story belongs in the same folder as the making of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, or Turner being lashed to the mast, like Odysseus, to observe a storm at sea. Without the story, the picture is nothing. Without the picture, the story is nothing. Without the overarching project, without the specificity of time and place, neither picture nor story have any context or coherence. Put them all together, however, and something truly extraordinary has been made, so long as we are prepared to invest the necessary trust, going so far as to consider a blank white photographic print as, at the same time, documentary evidence, a work of art, a testament, and a semi-parodic condensation of the whole romantic enterprise, a sort of negative image of the "black page" in Tristram Shandy. Or, perhaps, as an evocation of how it feels to be "nothing himself" beholding "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is"...

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man

Meanwhile, I await the publication of The World's Edge later this year with some anticipation, "Polar White-Out" and all. I'm sure I'll find space for it somewhere.

A Mind of Winter