the anxiety of photography, Arthouse at the Jones Center, Austin
The banal anxieties that I had in mind as I worked on this image were rather different from the postmodern conceptualist concerns of the curator’s introduction and artist statements for the The Anxiety of Photography exhibition we had seen earlier that day at Arthouse in downtown Austin.
My egocentric concerns, last Saturday, were:
- Will I have the courage to do more street photography in 2012?
- Are my photographs any good?
- Should I adopt the Sony NEX-7 or Panasonic GX-1 as my core camera in 2012?
- Will my stock options be worth enough to afford a new camera in 2012?
- Should I purchase an unnecessary upgrade to Adobe Photoshop, that I cannot right now afford, at the ‘special’ discount price expiring December 31st?
- Will I fall down these stairs if I don’t stop looking through the viewfinder?
[Asside: The last two issues are the only ones that I have yet resolved: I did not fall down the stairs and I did not, and will not, give Adobe any more money for Photoshop until they revert to their previous upgrade policy. More on Adobe in a later post.]
The exhibition’s concerns were (quoting the description for the associated book by Matthew Thompson on Amazon.com):
Photography’s undefined, in-between status–as a medium, a tool, an object, a practice or, more often than not, some combination thereof–is still however, unresolved.
As with much postmodernist art, the curator’s preamble and many of the the artist statements required the prior consumption of a shelf full of books and considerable deconstruction to interpret. Despite this fog of obscurity, several of the art works were worth taking the time to see and, for me at least, successful. I particularly enjoyed the two pieces by Erin Shirreff, which were visually striking from a distance and increasingly rewarding on approach; these managed to combine aesthetic pleasure in their form with humor and commentary in their content.
Still, at first blush, such postmodernist thinking does not have much connection to my own form of “straight” photography. For the purposes of the Arthouse presentation, the term “Photography” in “The Anxiety of Photography” has the same relationship as “oil paint” in “Impressionist Painting”, i.e. photographic content, chemistry and references as material for inclusion in the construction of composite work rather than as a stand alone, self contained, art medium. But the longer I have pondered the more I have come to recognize that my images are no more concrete and no less synthetic than the works shown in the gallery space.
The picture above may suggest anxiety in its angled forms, shadows, reds, voids, doorways and the feet of hidden approachers (a gang maybe?), but those anxieties were not present at the time the photograph was taken; they are my superimposed interpretation after fact. The image is not “documentary truth” of an event or physical state that actually existed; the image is “true” in my mind but not true in any court of law. The anxious center of the image, the woman in the red sweater, is actually my wife whose main concern at the time was how many blocks she would have to walk to get to the nearest café. I may not be a postmodern conceptual artist but I am definitely a candidate for postmodernist critique, just not important enough to be worthy of the effort.
The Panasonic GF1 is the light and discrete camera I carry for street photography and grab shots; it is my ‘affordable by mortals’ Leica M9-P substitute (see 
