A New History of Photography
You may think this strange, but I feel I can attempt this project because I realize my conceptions (visual or otherwise) are somewhat unoriginal. And I don’t mean that in a self-deprecating way. It’s simply noticing the truth that things we make or create are rarely singularly unique conceptually. Our ideas reflect and rarely extend very far beyond other trains of thought that pre-exist us. Perhaps unbeknownst to us, we’re engaged in a deep conversation about our world as we try to understand the form it takes. Each of our lives reflects this conversation. My pictures are images of that dialog. If we recognize the ways in which ideas move through us, rather than think they originate with us, we'd get an inkling of the profound way acquired ideas form our conceptions of—not only the world—but who we think we are.
Recognizing that ideas and even images form an essential quality of our being, makes everyone of us functionaries in the service of ideas and images. As we absorb and then project our influences, we project whole histories, personal and otherwise, whether we understand them or not. It is not that the world is a mirror to us individually; it is that we mirror concepts about the world back into the world; we mirror the things we love and the ideas that have influenced us, and the things we believe; we mirror the language and the culture as it forms who we are, individually and collectively. And as these conceptions of reality move through us, they shift and flower and fade. Several years after I first gave credence to these thoughts, I am constantly reminded how our influences speak us.
History exerts a particular influence. As expressions of ideas, histories tell us, as best they can, how we came to be at a particular moment in time.
Just as I wonder about former conceptions of the history of photography, I wonder, in general terms, about our own ideas about history, about my ideas about history. Are we not, in the end, all of us, in large measure, not only a product of history but also an expression of our understanding of history, as we see it and as we believe it to be? Samuel Johnson said, “We must consider how very little history there is; I mean real authentic history. That certain Kings reigned, and certain battles were fought, we can depend on as true; but all the colouring, all the philosophy of history is conjecture." We have illusions and conceptions that rule our lives, including mythologies of history. Inevitably, certain truths will evade us, even when we have the facts, since they involve mysteries of our own consciousness and ideas we are loath to face. I present here my crooked understanding of the history of photography, as it organically surfaced in the work I made over the course of many years. Sequenced with lapses and dwelling excessively on certain ways of seeing, many of you will not agree with the history I present, but it is a history of photography as best as I can make of it.
Text © 2008 by Ken Schles
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