Photography and the Illusion of Control

Accidents, mistakes, failures, and surrender

i. 

I’m on a beach in the north, wide open, the tide out. I turn my lens to a girl, a young woman, who has opened her life to me. The sand is hard under our feet, stinging our cheeks now and again when it’s flicked up by the coastal wind of May in uppermost England. With my camera on her, the scene shrinks. The horizon is a point to move higher or lower; I step towards her and away. Open my camera, click out the roll, lick it closed, and move in another. The crunch of the shutter. The small words of my directions, and the deep blue of her hair. We are two figures in this spreading landscape, one fixing the other between these points, the sky and the sea and the sand, until we break apart, promise to get doughnuts together next time, I wait for the train, brush sand from my knees where I’ve knelt.

When I take the film in later, it turns out that eight of the nine rolls are blank.

ii.

As a practice, photography relies precariously on a long series of machines and processes. Innumerable factors affect the pictures I’d like to take; I never have total control (or even halfway control, as it often feels). There are the idiosyncrasies of the machine and the materials, which you can sometimes protect against, and other times not: a camera that glitches or breaks, bad or old film stock, film left too long in the developer and overcooked, film that’s passed through X-ray machines, rushed scans from the negative, a rushed print, a print left too long in the dark or the light, and so on. A corrupted memory card, grit in the sensor, batteries drained double-time by freezing weather.

There are the unchangeable, uncontrollable factors of the day itself: the light, the room, the weather; the person you arrive to photograph, who is perhaps grumpy, or hasn’t slept well, or doesn’t like having their picture taken, or hasn’t much time, or is terribly self-conscious, or otherwise reluctant. Some people are photographed all the time, and have a polished idea of how they’d like to be seen, and it’s that image you’re working against. Some people hate photographers, and to them you’re not a person but a predator.

There are the limits of one’s own body. Perhaps it’s you that is tired, or grumpy, or ate something strange, or is feeling afraid. Perhaps you’re rushed, or can’t muster the will to engage properly. Perhaps you’re ill, or injured, or it comes to the end of the day and the moment when the other factors all coalesce is the point you lose momentum, missing the thing you might otherwise have caught. Conversely, perhaps it’s a day that is utterly blessed: the light is stunning, the time feels loose and easy, the person you’re with is open and connected, you’re filled with energy and lucidity, the cameras all work perfectly.

To photograph is to be bolted to time and to space. I can’t help but need to be present in the same time and place that my subject is. If my camera or my body somehow fails, then the picture makes a record of this failure. If all is in flow, then this is also what the picture makes a record of.

iii.

I told a friend I’m writing about accident and control. The first thing, she said, is to take out the word accident; that it removes agency. But I think that’s part of what photography has represented, for me: a removal or deferral of agency. The feeling that my photographs are, in many ways, not my responsibility, or do not proceed directly from me.

iv. 

I use the word accident because I have made pictures that I cannot claim responsibility for. They’re lucky mistakes. Not because I’ve done something wrong, usually, but because the things that mediate my work — my cameras — have malfunctioned in a way that was concealed from me at the time. This happens to everyone, as far as I can tell, as a result of all of these mitigating factors, the machines we all use, which have no will but seem as though they do: a trickster spirit, deciding to fail when it’s most inconvenient. Researching for a different article this month, I came across a short-lived column in The New Yorker, more than ten years ago, called Great Mistakes: photographers describing the story of a beautiful image that came about by accident, and how.

I collect stories like these, from friends and artists I admire. The light leak that happened anomalously, casting a holy glow across a person’s face, a person not long for the world; the many double exposures unintended; the camera that jammed, overlaying every picture on top of the next, until what came out was an impressionistic wash of colours, seeming almost to move, the only intelligible shape a bird in the sky in the centre. How many of the pictures I love are holy accidents like these?

The time on the beach: the disappearance of pictures altogether. I had the camera repaired, of course, but it failed me twice more; in a London woodland, in the glass atrium of a luxury factory in a European city I’d been flown to for a single day. Blank or unusable rolls, and pictures I never saw. These are the stakes of analogue photography: the requirement that you trust the pictures will come out. I wonder how much our reliance on the certitude offered by newer machines has made it harder and harder to trust these older processes. And with the lesser trust, lesser pictures?

We cannot deceive ourselves that we have complete control, especially when there are other people involved. The most I can do is work to make something possible; but the fineness of expression, the way the soul is revealed (or not) in an image, this is not my domain. Diane Arbus put it this way: “I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse.” And also: “One thing that struck me early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.”

vii.

(Where are the stories of the blocked photographer? I read about writer after writer who procrastinates, whose ideas run dry, who hates writing, despises it even, and is compelled towards it nonetheless. What about the person who is compelled to take pictures, but cannot?)

viii.

“I shut myself in a person’s cellar after taking their picture for a magazine, to remove the film that was jammed in the back. The quiet dark, the wet earth smell of that underground room, after the brightness of the picture and the dappled light against the window. My camera felt different in my hands without being able to see it. After a time, I saw the palest outline of the cellar door, floating there like a ghost.”

“In a high-up village, climbing through the centuries-old earth-lined tunnels that led from one house to another on the face of the mountain, a button fell off my camera and I found a little twig to poke inside and nudge the tiny prongs I saw there, not knowing what any of them were for, but hoping. The camera continued to work intermittently. When it stopped again, another poke with the little twig.”

“On a boat on a lake on a volcanic island, an important assignment, exquisite light, high pressure, the crescendo of the trip — the camera stopped winding. I tried again and again but it was stuck fast, as though it’d never move. I tried to force it; nothing. I opened the back and pulled out the film. Reloaded. Changed the battery. Took the lens on and off; put another lens on. The sun going down. The camera stopped, and my bag with the others was in the van on the shore. I sat as the boat rowed across for its trip, a useless passenger, and watched as the sky turned dark over the water.”

ix.

Arbus again: 

“I don’t know what good composition is…. Sometimes for me composition has to do with a certain brightness or a certain coming to restness and other times it has to do with funny mistakes. There’s a kind of rightness and wrongness and sometimes I like rightness and sometimes I like wrongness.”

The sense she gave of allowing her work to surprise her; to not know even her own appetite or taste completely. The trouble with a desperation for control is that it doesn’t allow for this kind of surprise or capriciousness. It doesn’t allow for ecstatic failure, or ecstasy of any kind. Ecstasy and surprise imply abandon; photography, with its dependence on all of these outside forces, is the perfect medium for complete surrender, for abandoning oneself and one’s plans. Rightness, wrongness.

As time has passed, and I’ve read and written more, I’ve been coming to find that I have no control in writing, either, though I’ve often thought of it as the pliable inverse of stubborn photography. The illusion of control is stronger, certainly, but actually it asks the same abandon of me. When I try too hard to control, the writing’s dead and overwrought. From Kate Zambreno’s Drifts:

I never know, when I sit down to write, how to replicate that movement and those discoveries that come when my mind wanders. When I sit down to write, I begin to wander to another thought entirely. I think of Sebald saying in an interview that when he sat down to write, he didn’t know where he was going, he followed his thoughts and connections like a dog in a field.

To write with too much control is to not allow for those discoveries, which is actually what the best writing is for. It’s the same with photographing. I like the idea of the dog in the field: following a work — whatever the medium — as though it has its own will, trotting or bounding, stopping to sniff something, chasing a rabbit, making the long grass shake.

ix.

I have been starting to learn about surrender, in my work and in my life. I have been starting to believe that it’s better to remove the idea of control from the work entirely. The best I can do is turn up, as a person with some years of experience, and many accumulated hours spent looking at photographs on walls and in books and online, and a set of equipment that both approximates and is responsible for the way I see photographically; and be open to what I find. Marshal the variables in a way that seems right, but without a white-knuckle grip, without frustration, without desperation, without the fear that I am insufficient to the task. Allow myself to be surprised by the results, after the wait to see the pictures; look on them not with a critical eye, but with acceptance and curiosity, the way I do paintings, or the works of others, or children. Assume they are complete and perfect, and respond from that place. 

x.

I’m thinking of this piece of writing as a contact sheet, a gathered bunch of impressions, the shutter pressed again and again to capture and frame some different thoughts that came to mind when I thought about control, and accident, and agency, and surprise, and surrender, and flow. Not perfectly tuned or organised but bunched and dusty. Take them and edit them, disregard them as you feel.

Part of the loosening of control I’ve been trying to coax out of myself is to just let things come out and be as they are. I don’t know if it’s satisfying or maddening to read this shapeless thing. But publishing it frightens me, to be honest, and I’m telling myself that’s good. Perhaps it’s a funny mistake, or a wrongness. A few frames overlaid, blurred, blurring.

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