Place, subject, and seeing: unpinning the butterflies — Photos: Jason Lucas
Photos: Jason Lucas By Jason Lucas / From Chillicothe, Ohio During a recent three-week photo trip to China, I was reminded again just how fleeting and delicate the ability to see can be for a photographer. I welcomed this trip without reservations; I had become aware that, partly due to routine and repetition, I had begun having trouble seeing. I would go out to shoot, and come home empty-handed, or with photographs that I knew I wasn’t “connected” with in any way, photographs that didn’t mean anything to me. It was as if — though my eyes were still working as well physically as they had before — I was going blind. Shooting in the same places for too long, it’s easy for a photographer’s eye to become lazy — to start taking things for granted, to miss what’s right underfoot, to begin the exhausting, interminable search for something new, something different, something “interesting.” As my relationship with a place changes and I become more familiar with it, my focus as a photographer has a tendency to shift from line, pattern, space, tone, symmetry, and texture to subject matter — to the idea of the photograph as document. When I worry too much about what’s in the photograph and whether the subject itself will be of general interest, it feels like I lose something bigger, something more substantial. I transform myself into a sort of clerk (or at best, a curator), tasking myself to make an inventory of my surroundings and “capture” relevant or important items photographically, pinning them to a display board for exhibition like a butterfly collector at a science fair. “Look, see this object? See this place? Look where I was, look what I saw! Isn’t that interesting?” And ultimately, I don’t think those are the questions I want to ask (or the job I want to do) with my photographs. In the weeks and months before my trip, I had felt my thinking begin to shift this way, and shaking things up a little visually seemed like a good idea. A trip to China promised to do just that; traveling anywhere new seems to allow for fresh perspective, as it’s tough for me to be bored with things I’ve never seen before. And this wouldn’t just be a trip to a nearby town in southern Ohio, with fire hydrants painted a different color or buildings a few years older. In China, I knew, architecture, infrastructure, traffic patterns, signage, and folkways would be different; in a way, I was counting on “culture shock” to jolt my sleepy vision awake. And, naturally, it did. My first few days in China were so visually stimulating that I was overwhelmed; everything seemed so relevant, so worthy of photographic attention. I was shooting everything I saw. At the end of three days, I had shot 1500 frames! At some point, though, while slogging through all the junk I shot in the heady excitement of those first few days, I realized that I still wasn’t really seeing — I was still just looking, still just as beholden the idea of the photograph as document as I had been before I left the United States. Sure, I was documenting more in China — but I was paying far more attention to subject than I was to color, composition, and light. And I was making photographs that I found utterly boring, at best. It hit me that what I had thought of before as “not seeing” — taking my surroundings for granted, missing what was always right under my nose — was only one way to “not see.” For me, at least, overemphasizing subject and treating the photograph as representational evidence is another. Happily, after a few days, the initial shock began to wear off, and I finally seemed to settle down and get back to the business of seeing. For the remainder of my stay in China, I tried to keep in mind that photographs have the potential to be more — more than a direct representation of a subject, more than proof of physical presence or existence, more than another killed butterfly pinned to a mounting board. And I count it a victory that, when my friends and acquaintances invariably ask me if I visited the Great Wall of China on my trip, I can say: “Yes, but you’d never know it from the pictures.”
|
