An Archiectural Poetic Document

[RonPrice]

A DOCUMENT, A RECORD

The Metropolitan Museum of Art held a retrospective in April 2000 on the photographical work of Walker Evans. I know nothing about Mr. Evans, but his photography was an interesting document on his times, a record of his days and years, the sentiments and styles in the first half century of American history and a personal autobiography. The brief summary I saw, perhaps ten minutes, on The News Hour with Tim Lehrer went by so quickly I did not catch it all. But it had something to say, indirectly, about my own autobiographical work and about architecture. -Ron Price with thanks to The News Hour with Tim Lehrer, 5:00-6:00 pm, 7 April 2000.

Showing my world as I see it:
a poet warrior, heavily armed
with the stuff of my life,
my world, my religion—
my playful and not-so-playful
energies, moods and desires--
a document over three epochs,
a record of my days,
not so plain and simple,
clear and visually straight
from the shoulder as Evan’s work.

But, with Keats, an almost instant
transmutation of impressions, thoughts,
life’s architecture, reading and ideas
into poetry, well, what some might call
poetry, what I see as a study for poetry.1

1 See Robert Gittings, Selected Poems and Letters of Keats, Heinemann Books Ltd., London, 1981(1966), pp.8-11.

Ron Price
7 April 2000
(revised for:
‘This So Called Life’
18/2/06)

[RonPrice]

I always think photographs abominable and I don't like to have them around, particularly not those of persons I know and love. Some people feel the same ways about photos of buildings and you can go into millions of homes and never see an architectural photos. This is an aesthetic reality the implications of which deserve our contemplation.-Ron Price with thanks to Vincent van Gogh, "Letter of September 19th, 1889," The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh.

"Due to the physical action of light and the chemical action of development," writes Susan Sontag, "there is a tangible link between what was photographed, through the developing process to the gaze of the viewer. It is a process involving something that has been, due to the photograph as an object, due to the action of light, due to radiations that ultimately touch me and due to the photograph being something for the gaze, the visual memory, of the viewer. The photograph of a missing being touches me like the delayed rays of a star." The photograph of a missing building touches me like the relayed rays of the moon, a super nova or the icy glare of a meteor photographed on its potential trajectory to earth. -Ron Price with thanks to Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977.
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At the age of sixty-three I now possess a dozen albums of photographs of various sizes and shapes. They could represent a significant aspect of any autobiography, any memoir, I might want to write. This essay, this part of a chapter of what is now a 2600 page memoir, tries to put all these photographs in perspective, tries to provide readers with my personal hermeneutics of the visual, at least that part of the visual that got packaged into these twelve albums in a culture which gives hegemony to the visual. More generally, too, I provide here in this part of my memoir a fragmented, an episodic, examination of the phenomenon of seeing. What the famous Italian film director Federico Fellini said about film could also apply to my photographs of both people and architecture: "My films are not for understanding," said Fellini, "They are for seeing." This essay, though, is about understanding. For the architect at this Architecture Forum I hope I provide some useful, some interesting, comments here. Such is my hope.

The French sociologist and philosopher, often abused, often amused, often confused(or so it seems to many a student who has had to study his writings in the last 30 years)--one, Jean Baudrillard, said that "no matter which photographic technique is used, there is always one thing, and one thing only, that remains: the light. Photography is the writing of light and this light is the very imagination of the image. Baudrillard sees his photographs as making the world a little more enigmatic and unintelligible, as exposing the very unreality of the world of appearances. Any photograph is never of any "real" world, but rather, it is a record of the momentary appearances behind which the real hides. To him, the world is essentially illusion.

I certainly sense this as I look back over nearly 100 years of photographs in my dozen albums, photographs of family and friends, of buildings, of rooms, of walls, ceilings, gardens, inter alia, going back to 1908. Our contemporary culture of digitization and image-glut actually shrivels the ethical force of photographs of whatever type intended to elicit compassion, sensitivity or the milk of human kindness. Many, I know, would not agree with this statement, but I think the statement offers some truth even to those who are inclined to disagree with it on an initial inspection. In an age in which spectacle has usurped the place of reality in many situations, photographic images of course still have the power to evoke shock and sentiment.

Photographs, so this argument runs, are the fragmentary emanations of reality, the punctual and discrete renderings of truth, rather than the uniform grammar of a consistently unfolding tale. I would hesitate, then, to draw on my collection of photographs, however numerous, however bright and shiny, colourful and clear, as evidence of the unfolding tale of my life and its tangential connections with the lady down the street, my mother or girl friend, or even that wondrous scene over there in those paintings. All of those portrayals of reality--relay and transmit diffuse assemblages of affect, without necessarily appealing to the coherent, narrative understanding of an interpretive, rational consciousness. Now that is an interesting point of view, but what does it actually mean?

The photographic frame is not just a visual image awaiting its interpretation; it is itself actively interpreting, even forcibly making a statement. Sontag wrote that where "narratives make us understand, photographs do something else. They haunt us." Our age, she goes on, is one in which "to remember is more and more not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture." Given the sheer sweep of the visual image in contemporary culture and politics, I struggle to come to terms with the nature of memorialisation in all its forms effected by photographs. I ponder as to what is the kind of affect relayed by photographic images as discrete and punctual fragments of reality. What, I ask myself, is the semiological universe that is being called into play by such dissociated transmissions of affectivity in all these photos.

The culture of 'image-glut' gives us a harried and in fact beleaguered document of reality. I am on my guard that these words of mine do not turn into something that is little more than a frustrated rant against the inhuman multiplication not just of images, but of the sacrilegious settings in which we see them. The place of the image in an era of information-overload, and the capacity of the image in such a landscape to infinitely, and perhaps "irrationally," multiply its significations in relation to continuously mobile variations gives me cause to ponder. To photograph is to frame and to frame is to exclude. My dozen volumes of photos have indeed excluded most of my life. Enough. this small cyberspace is now filled to overflowing and many readers will have found, not an image-glut, but a word glut. To themI apologize.-Ron Price, Tasmania.