thoughts on shots: May 2009

(damn - where did the last year go?)

I thought a good first post after nearly a year might be about my - initial - and then - considered - reaction to the MOMA Into the Sunset show on myth-making and the American West. One of the central points of the MOMA show is that photography's development rose alongside the settlement of the west and because of this, photography more so than any other medium shaped this myth of the west, what we hold in our "collective imagination." My initial reaction was "God, I'm so tired of the idealization of the west." Is it rational to be annoyed with a whole region? Eh... probably not, but, initial reactions are typically not thoughtful ones. (I also don't have a very articulate response for why I'm annoyed with the West. It has a little something to do with the rah-rah-ness of those who live in little mountain towns and maybe a lot to do with basic regionalism. I live in New York City - the exact opposite of "the American West" (and yes, another mythologized place).)

My more considered reaction was to see the images, read up on the show's philosophy and take in some reviews (Slate, New York Times, Village Voice, and blog entry by Lane Wallace on Andrew Sullivan's blog) before answering the question of photography's role in western myth-making. Most of what I read used a consistent interpretation of "myth" as a "misrepresentation" of facts. A false story. And so, the question these reviews were answering was... 'did photography help in selling us a bill of goods about the West? did photography abet a false representation of the landscape, its people, and culture?' The Slate article seems to want to plot the timeline from the "rugged realities" of the West to a "fantasy of ruggedness." That at some point, photography went from depicting what was true, to aggrandizing what was there. And, given the more ironic, bleak images in the MOMA show, photography then also burst the bubble it created by also showing the waste and blight of more modern western scenes. But the traditional meaning of a myth is that it is a sacred story, tied in some instances to a religious belief, that tells us of our origins. How the world and mankind came into being. And in the telling we are connected again with the divine. And far from being a false representation, myth was generally believed to be a "true" story of a long distant past. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."

Given this meaning, photography has most assuredly spread the myth of the West. Because it is in the sublimity of the mountains and the vastness of the firmament that it is just possible to see the divine. To feel awed and alive to simply be in the presence of such wonders. I remember this feeling when I was living Montana. To feel so... small... in comparison... is to finally see the work of the gods. Not small in the sense of being insignificant, but small in the realization that out there is something bigger than yourself. And yet, this meaning doesn't negate the parallel myth of the West's individualistic spirit, but fosters it. A popular figure in mythology is the trickster - someone who is able to bridge the divide between humans and the gods. The trickster defies conventional rules, goes his own way. From the cowboy to the post-college ski bum we can see the mythology of the trickster at work.

I think in the collective imagination of "The West" there lies the idea of something larger than life, the possibility for rebirth, the ability to test boundaries and triumph. I think the narrower meaning of myth as misrepresentation is the false story of "Into the Sunset." Photography shows us a land that gives us a chance to feel the divine. Have we trashed what was sacred as some of the images show? Undoubtedly. But even those images point more fiercely to a primordial past that gave life to what is. Sometimes without the depiction of scale, without overt juxtapositions, we might overlook the obvious.