Cyclo driver, Saigon, 2005.
How does a photographer’s intent manifest in a photo?
If there is intention, there must also be meaning in the photographer’s mind. “I intend to capture the photo that I am about to take in the next moment because there is something significant in my mind about that incipient future moment.” It’s like when you’re driving on the open road and see something in the distance that catches your eye. As you drive closer, it also seems to be approaching you, growing in visibility, context, and, inevitably, meaning. The latter is largely a function of our second nature tendency to interpret and assign a place in our cosmology to everything we see. John Berger states:
“Certainty may be instantaneous; doubt requires duration; meaning is born of the two. An instant photographed can only acquire meaning insofar as the viewer can read into it a duration extending beyond itself. When we find a photograph meaningful, we are lending it a past and a future.”
So what did I intend by taking this photo of my cyclo driver in Saigon? Even more, what did I mean by it?
I look at this photo now and am struck by how many of my current philosophical concerns are visible within it. The group of cyclos we are traveling in is in the middle of a roundabout on the grand boulevard of the city during a torrential rain, lending a sense of infinite circularity to its arduous and melancholy tone. A certain layered duality of the gaze can be sensed in the fact that the driver may or may not have his eyes open while he may or may not be glancing back at me, who he knows is taking photos. Neither of us knows what the other knows about the other, placing us in both identical and separate mental spaces at the same time.
To get back to my question, absolutely none of this was apparent to me when I took the photo. To be honest, I merely noticed that the hood of the cyclo created an interesting visual frame that echoed the wide rectangle of my shutter as well as a cinema frame. Thus, I simply hoped to capture a “cinematic” moment, whatever that meant. I wasn’t concerned with any of the issues that the image engenders within me now, and I unfortunately wasn’t thinking about what the photo might mean to the driver himself. (As much as I hate to admit it, Sontag was right that photographers tend to be not only voyeurs but, just as often, voleurs as well.)
Araki Nobuyoshi depicts a struggle against the absolute reality of a photo-subject that one knows one cannot fundamentally alter (in his case, “woman”), causing one to see oneself more clearly, warts and all. It is the impossible subject as mirror. In an essay from 1976, he states just as much:
In photographing a woman’s genitals laid bare, you must make the stripper and the audience know when the shutter is released. Likewise, the strobe flashes in time with the shutter’s sound. With that, the stripper’s embarrassment and one’s own embarrassment can be bared clearly, to the stripper and the audience alike, and the person who releases the shutter himself is likewise exposed.
Ultimately, Araki represents the art of photographing as, not merely self-declaration or expression, but self-actualization and existence; a visualized and imagined performance of self in the “looking-glass” of the camera lens. We might say therefore that in photography the manifestation of intent and excitement is an act of self-actualization.
In the seconds before opening my shutter, was there something generated within me that reflected the potential for excitement that the resulting image might cause? Perhaps I merely knew something was there that would excite me. The fact that the driver is not looking at me while needing to look at everything else around us on a very busy road was what inspired me to “create” this moment, as it were. In other words, the driver’s intention to maintain his attention away from me, despite being aware of my camera, made manifest an excitement within me, allowing me to experience the flower of interest within my perception of his state of being. This then led directly to the seed of my intent to take the photo and likewise produce a further layer of excitement and wonder within me.
Thus, photography can be a way of realizing the interior vision, voice, and intent of the photographer that results in an expression that both fully reveals their presence and does not do so at all.
All this because it was raining that day.
(Thanks to Peter Sellars)
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