Only words?

Only words…

One of the things that gets under my skin is the way that people writing about photography as a collectible art use words. ‘This inexorable pull adds complexity and intrigue, inviting questions while making us unsettled. Or ‘confronted by the veracity of life’… They are words, Jim, but not as we know them.

Along with a weird approach to timelines, so that we never get the facts (Ma’am, just the facts) in a way that allows us to order them in our minds, and wilful assumptions that we’re familiar with Roland Barthes and his concept of the photographic image as a message without a code. It makes it really hard work for the average photographer (or anyone else) to do two important things – get past the prose to the writer’s meaning, and an appreciation of the pictures.

And I wonder why. An uncharitable view is that writers on ‘photography as art’ did formal training as artists or photographers, and didn’t make the grade, so they are still writing undergraduate essays, with all the flourishes and little vanities you expect from someone of 20. (I suppose that you could argue that the passive verbs and third-party reporting of traditional science writing is equally bad, just different…)



I love Iain M Banks’ science fiction, and his novels (without the ‘M’), and his informal, intelligent style. Occasionally an idea gets lost or tangled, but most of the time, his writing convinced me that he understood my view of the world, because he wrote about it the way that I like to think I do. There’s a more conscious style than in the magnificently lucid writing of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke, but it’s balanced with wit and a certain cynicism. And that sentence reads like the sort of stuff I’m criticising…

People have told me I have a way with words, and if it’s true, I am very lucky. I didn’t do anything special, or go on lots of courses. On a good day, I like to think that I have a bit of a way with a camera – but in both areas, I know that my average day is a lot more average than I’d like. And in both media, I lack staying power for long projects or lengthy essays. But we shouldn’t expect everyone to be particularly fluent in words or pictures.

The thought I want to leave you with is that it’s a better world if we don’t jump to make judgments, and instead try, hard, to understand what the author is trying to say. They say that when you sing a hymn with joy and enthusiasm, God hears the voice of Paul Robeson. We should all aspire to be a little more godlike, so that we can read, see and hear the poetry in others’ attempts to communicate.