At Hunt’s Photo & Video in Harvard Square, they ship your exposed, unprocessed film cassettes out to a lab in Melrose, Mass., where they process the film and make prints. When the processed film returns in a week or two, they transport it in white paper bags with different boxes checked for what was printed. At the bottom of the checkboxes there is a 3” x 4” rectangle labeled “Special Instructions.” On the three rolls I’m picking up—all Kodak Tri-X 36 exposure black-and-white process film—this rectangle has a blue circle shaped sticker and a handwritten, underlined word: “blank.”
The young woman behind the desk—tall, curly haired, late twenties with good posture and a casual demeanor—takes the rolls out of the paper packages one at a time.
“They’re all blank,” she says. “What were you shooting with?”
“A paper camera,” I say.
“Like a Holga?” she says without hesitation.
“No a paper camera.”
“These are all underexposed,” she says, carefully moving a few feet away and conducting some stage business with the register.
Blank film? All three rolls? This was not a huge surprise to me. The camera I was shooting with I had made myself from plans downloaded from the Internet. Would you be surprised if a first-time terrorist, building a bomb from plans he found on the Internet didn’t get it right? No, there is nothing to be surprised about.
The Rubikon Pinhole Rebel 2 camera is available at no cost—the copyright details cite creative commons—and you can download it directly from the designer’s website as a PDF. From across the room the printed camera on flat paper looks sort of like a cheap jigsaw puzzle or a used template for spray paint: There are only black rectangular shapes and the black outlines that make up the other shapes of the camera panels. The designer, Jaroslav Juřica, a thirty-year-old Czech artist, wasted no space on the seven sheets by marrying the template panels with utilitarian and visual grace.
My first cut into the paper felt like a big moment, like I was starting up a staircase to a new apartment.
Juřica told me via email that the second version of the Rubicon, which I was building, is a simplification of an earlier model (still available in a similar PDF). Juřica writes that the first Rubikon “had a zoom and was more complex” but after user feedback, he decided to simplify because, “we have already coped with the digital age, so by the new shape he wants to recall the roots.”
Juřica’s comment about the digital age gets me thinking about the basic idea behind this whole article: Today there is a steady and focused group of youths who are subverting the digital paradigm. They have no formal grouping—just youths. There are larger, well defined groups that are integrating digital life with other modalities (Steampunk, for example, contains elements of digital life coupled with the baroque), but walk through a street fair in a hipster haven like Somerville, Mass., and you will find as many youths toting 35mm SLRs as Digital SLRs. A brief Google shopping search places resale value for the Canon AE-1—manufactured from 1976 to 1984—at a pricey $200.
Also, there are an alarming amount of iPhone and Droid applications that will convert your “boring” high-resolution digital photographs into faded, pixelated, or white-bordered pictures à la the Polaroid Instamatic. The idea that photographs should be black-and-white or older is the simplest reaction to the modern digital photograph; I too feel drawn to them.
But why? Why are some of us shucking digitization of images and pursuing an if-not-yet, then-likely-soon-to-be archaic art form?
I like to think that the way the new generation takes photographs is not readily akin to the art we’re used to, what we’ll call capital-a Art, which is based more in a Henri Cartier-Bresson conception of photographs. Cartier-Bresson’s famous idea (and I’m definitely summarizing here) was that there was the Decisive Moment that made a photographer: there was one vantage point, one perfect individualized way to frame a scene, and a clear focus on what was being shown therein that made a photographer’s eye worthy of Art. When Diane Arbus photographed Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park she gets the perfect image of that child, an Artistic rendition of the moment when the way he played with that grenade is loaded with signifiers. And that’s even out in the real world; an extreme example would be a controlled or studio environment and precision framing like Cindy Sherman’s Complete Untitled Film Stills. Contrast that with so many of the photographs you see in a day, which seem to be taken en masse and without that need to get it perfect in one shot. A scapegoat may be simply that today there are no finite amounts of materials, as there were in the film-based camera world of yesteryear. Today a photographer can take thousands of photographs and breeze through them for just the right shot, deleting the unacceptable shots with that little cartoon trashcan on the back of every digital camera. But has this helped our photographs?
And, yes, there are photographers that are not photographing for Art. Photographs on social websites—e.g. Facebook or Flickr (the latter arguably on the art-Art line, the former art-heavy)—are gaining more of an arc and resist the single-frame mentality that Cartier-Bresson described. If you visit the photo-happy Friend’s profile and click through their pictures, you get more of a full story. An album can be a day, a month, a decade worth of pictures, but the uploader has complete control over the order, amount, and subjects. Clicking through a online photo album or a photo-stream or even scanning pictures on your local disk has become more like watching a photo-movie — and I’m not talking about something of the quality of La Jetée—than reading Robert Frank’s The Americans. (Here’s a billion-dollar-idea for the Facebook developers: include the ability for users to upload audio to coincide with their albums. Then include a slideshow feature and Bam! Instant movie.) The modern photographer assumes the role of editor of their own photo-streams, but do they think about narrative?
Books made by professional editors and that are carefully planned in their layout still exist, but many amateur photographers are just showing images and not thinking about how the images relate to one another. If we think about Robert Frank’s The Americans, we can assume it is no accident that a photograph of a covered car in Long Beach, Calif., precedes a photograph of a dead body that has been similarly covered following a car accident on U. S. 66 between Winslow and Flagstaff, Ariz. But how many Facebook albums are edited so well? When you flip through Suzie-Q’s album about her week at the beach or the wedding of someone you knew way back when, do you comment to yourself Well, there’s an interesting juxtaposition. I wonder why she chose to put those images side-by-side. Of course, our old scapegoat storms back in: you can have millions of photographs on a disc the size of a quarter. Editing no longer matters! We are just documenting everything that ever happened! My retort: There is a reason that Jack Kerouac’s introduction to The Americans contains the line, “To Robert Frank I now give this message: You Got eyes.”
So, when I started this pinhole paper camera project I guess I was feeling rebellious to all these unedited online photo-streams the way anyone who still uses film for Art might feels. I’d started to reject the idea that photography should be so instantaneous, so easy. I eschewed the thought: Let’s just take a bunch of pictures of the dog and then pick one good one for the Christmas card. I wanted to take the time to line up my shot and get it right. In fact, I wanted to take the time to build my own camera and really think about all the steps leading up to taking that perfect moment. That way, when the process is over and I can view the results there is more to consider, more thinking involved when appreciating the photographs. I’m a reactionary, yes, but with a clear test plan.
In his treatise Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes writes about how viewing a photograph is a distinctly subjective experience and that all excellent photographs contain two main elements: the studium and a punctum. These are the elements of an image or photograph that make it worth looking at: the studium is the basic elements that incorporate a standard scene, as Barthes writes, “Which I perceive quite familiarly as a consequence of my knowledge, my culture.” This studium is the ideology of the viewer and is a set that contains all the elements of a photograph that we already know. The second element is what stands outside of that set of ideology, or as Barthes writes, “will break (or punctuate) the studium” and that “rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.” We all experience very distinct studium and punctum.
For example, when I look at Cartier-Bresson’s On the Banks of the Marne, I use my existing knowledge of the context or studium of the photograph to understand the basics of it. Phenomenology describes this way of viewing an image as the intersubjectivity of the experience: when I am viewing the picture I am participating and it is participating and we are creating a sort-of feedback loop between us. I experience the bottle of wine in the hand of the portly gentleman and feed that through my personal ideology of existence, everything I know about photography, and about the studium of the image—yes, a grassy bank, yes, a boat in the water, yes, eating a picnic, yes, wearing a hat; these things all exist and I understand them instantly. And I experience what I know about Cartier-Bresson’s idea that this is the decisive moment, and that all feeds back from me into the photograph. That all becomes concrete. Then I glance again and I experience all this I experienced before, plus I get the knowledge that I have experienced this before. I get this all from the studium. I glance at the bottle a third time and I get the experience that I first had and the experience of seeing something again. The loop can be pleasing if the picture framing and ideology are satisfying, or displeasing if the image jars.
But after I view Marne for a few moments, I see an element—my punctum—that breaks the spell for me: there is a small girl sitting on the lap of one of the men. I can only see a bit of her hair because a man whose back is to me mainly hides her. Not being able to see this girl completely makes me realize that I’m looking at all the picnicker’s backs. Suddenly, I’m an outsider. The calmness of the photograph and all the things I know about the studium fade slightly and I feel like I just snuck up on these people and am intruding.
Cartier-Bresson’s vantage point is looking down on the picnickers and this makes me feel like I’m standing while everyone is sitting, which adds to the voyeuristic sense that I’ve just stumbled upon this great day and am completely unwelcome.
Cartier-Bresson or his editors chose Marne for some distinct reason—safest bets are not on my personal punctum—and the amount of time it has remained a popular image speaks to how well they chose. The photograph is famous but contains almost nothing that is important.
With today’s photo-streams, the studium and punctum of the intersubjective viewing have not gone extinct, but evolved into something different than what you experience with a still frame. When you flip through a set of images that have retained elements—or even if every image is completely new, completely different, but have a distinct (dare I say definite) eye—you have the feeling of just having seen the precursor leading into your experience. You are experiencing them as a set. Even in the most unedited, most unplanned photo-stream, the eye assesses the images at a much quicker pace because they appear in a series. The eye doesn’t search out the punctum that would make a single photograph important; rather, the eye searches for the one image that makes the whole photo-stream important. The studium transcends the entire album and expands to encompass all the images you will see in a series. But at the same time the punctum recedes. That small element may be in one photograph, may be in a few photographs, but it cannot withstand the weight of an entire photo-stream. There are always one or two photographs that make the album. The difference between the photo-stream and the individual photograph is that you don’t have the extended criteria, and studium, of the retaining album. The average photo-stream is not an abstract retrospective or collection, it is a simple posting of like images. The images themselves may not be exciting but you’re just scanning them for something interesting to break the spell of scanning them. There is a way to make Art from this, but I haven’t seen too many examples of it with day-to-day photography.
The writer Susan Sontag had all the thoughts you can have about photography. And she chronicled them in the essays in the collection On Photography. In the seminal essay for that collection, In Plato’s Cave, Sontag writes:
“A photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and a photographer; picture-taking is an event itself, and one with ever more peremptory rights—to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on.”
The gist here is that the basic idea behind the act of taking a photograph has taken the place of existing in a moment. You can stand somewhere—a party, Cape Canaveral, atop Le Arc de Triumph in freezing rain—and trade in your general anxiety from the despair of existence by snapping a photo. Taking the photograph excuses the photographer from directly using their intersubjectivity to experience the world by substituting such an acceptable buffer. You are not looking at Salvador Dali’s disorienting Téléphone-Homard in a strange country with a bunch of strangers you will never know, you are documenting the fact that Téléphone-Homard exists and that you were there, taking a photograph of it. Click! That exists and I took a photograph of it.
When I read In Plato’s Cave, I weighed the experience of seeing The Mona Lisa, where photographs are allowed, with the experience of seeing Guernica, where photographs are not allowed, and I always side with no photographs. Another quick example: In the Sistine Chapel, you are not allowed to take photos. Once every minute or so a flash goes off and a guard says, “No photography.” A minute later, the same happens. Ad nauseam. Being in the Sistine Chapel, seeing the creation series, experiencing the room, is amazing. Five years ago, when I was taking more photographs, I shot a single black-and-white shot in the Sistine Chapel without flash and without the viewfinder. And I know that I got the most famous panel of The Creation of Adam, but the photograph itself means nothing to me except to loop me back into the moment when I was there in that beautiful room. A scrap of paper with the word Sistine has the same intersubjective experience for me because there is no punctum to the photograph or the word, each can significantly trigger my sense memory of that visceral experience.
I’m thinking that the next time I travel I will bring a Rubikon with me. Good luck getting through airport security! The goal of the Rubikon for me is to create a memorable set of pictures that provide a real experience for me when I look at them. The pictures were going to trigger deep emotions from the moments that I took them and hopefully have resonating elements to any viewer. My goals are not to create images of anything important or epic because I can look up any image of anything online. A paper camera is about enjoying the process of taking photographs. This point is not lost on Juřica, who writes in an email, “nowadays the digital world has completely changed our lives. People on their vacation never see real beauty of the nature because they always look into the viewfinder. In other words, we are focused on the result, not on the experience.”
I spent about a month shooting three rolls of 36 exposures each. These first three rolls were tests. I didn’t take much notes about shutter speed, which is the only variable with the fixed-aperature of the Rubikon, I just carried the camera around with me. I shot in Cambridge and Allston and Jamaica Plain first and then Rhode Island and Maine. Just casually taking some shots during the course of my day.
Despite the out-of-the-ordinary appearance of the camera, it doesn’t raise eyebrows at all. When I was taking photographs of people on the bus or subway no one gave me a second glance. Apparently the nonchalance appearance of the camera can work for or against the photographer and Juřica writes that, “From one user I know that you cannot photograph in the Forbidden City in China but she took a photograph with the Rubikon that they did not mind / they didn’t see it as a danger.” But he also notes that he was once kicked out from the New York City subway as a suspected terrorist for taking a photo there.
My photographs were not of the Forbidden City or The Mona Lisa. For these rolls, I walked around town, visited my parents and get some action shots of their dog, and took half a roll during a beautiful wedding weekend in Bath, Maine. The images I was imagining, the moments I was deciding on were all my own, but in the end there is probably no major losses to American photographic tradition without my photographs of Todd and Theresa’s vows. Or the shots I took of Will and Anne in their front yard after the World Cup ended. More important was that the entire time I was focused on taking the best photographs possible and thinking about how the camera was functioning while I was taking them. Even without the photographs I still can recreate those moments because I was participating with existence in an interesting way.
Back at Hunt’s, with the blank film on the counter, the young woman continues her stage business at the register. After looking at each frame I shot and seeing nothing except undefined hints of people and places, I slowly roll the long, black snakes of film into tight coils and place them into their white bags. When I reach for my wallet, my head down like a love-lost Charlie Brown, the woman says, “You don’t have to pay for them.” And then, looking at my underexposed film, she says, “Don’t be sad.”
I can’t do anything with these photographs. I can’t show them to anyone, I can’t create a photo-stream and edit it to perfection. All those moments that I shot no longer exist. Maybe the Rubikon is not the answer I’m looking for. Maybe I need to set up a darkroom or embrace the digital revolution and find a better way to work within it.
“But I am sad,” I say.
“Well don’t be. It’s all about experimentation.”
And then, as if I hadn’t heard her quite perfectly, she says, “It’s all about experimentation.”
