Synecdoche
Drain Pipe in Rain 3 - Sushi Sake, Stonelake & Research, Austin
Synecdoche: a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole (as fifty sail for fifty ships), the whole for a part (as society for high society), the species for the genus (as cutthroat for assassin), the genus for the species (as a creature for a man), or the name of the material for the thing made (as boards for stage).
Merriam-Webster
Thanksgiving, after the meal was cleared, a good friend was explaining her need to make art as an outlet for self expression at this stage in her life. She turned to me for agreement on self expression as motive and purpose, but I was mute. I am one of those people that is cast into deep water by the habitual greeting of “How are you?” for which no response is expected beyond “Good, how are you?” If I take such daily questions so literally, struggling every time to compose a detailed and accurate answer, it is perhaps no great wonder that I am thrown off balance so much more by the subtle and complex question of “Why do you make art?”
There is self expression in all art and craft, even in how you make breakfast or tie your shoe, but I don’t think that “self expression” is enough to explain my underlying purpose in making photographs. I don’t write in my journal for self expression, I do that for self discovery. I don’t use photography for self discovery, I use it to investigate the feint possibility of there being meaning in life. I am looking for hope through the glass of my cameras, hence the quote at top of the home page of this web site:
Why is form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion
that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning.
Robert Adams
An abstract painting is the deliberate if not entirely conscious expression of a mind, of the painter’s mind. There can be little or no direct communication though such work as that of Clyfford Still or Mark Rothko and yet it can appeal at some non-linguistic level; its ultimate source is in its resonating with a shared sympathy and primeval recognition within us. If we stop trying to read such images for their meaning and instead allow ourselves to simply feel them then we may indeed find some common ground between ourselves, the artists, and our fellow viewers. When my viewfinder contains some abstraction of the world around me, what is it that I am communicating with at that moment? What is the source of that drawing by light?
Photography is a form of stop-motion Zen participation in the common moment before it is an expression of myself. A photograph, a true photograph rather than a Photoshopped invention, is a re-presentation of a narrow slice of the physical universe. My contribution to the expression is in the timing, the framing, the focus, the exposure and the color saturation – all selections from the palette offered by the universe. The image is as at least as much made by the world expressing itself as it is by the one holding the camera; the world draws itself onto another portion of itself.
I do not expect to find God through a Nikon lens but I am looking for the suggestion of some connection, some fabric, some tissue, some value that extends beyond my isolation and coming termination; some larger pattern in which I fit and to which I belong.
That is the synecdoche I seek; the part that speaks for the whole. That’s why I make photographs.
