WB valorises a tradition which he contrasts unfavourably with 'the hobbyist's search for single images ... [who are] amusing themselves and their fellow enthusiasts' (p53). That which supposedly distinguishes 'creative' photographers is their pursuit of something called 'personal truths' - a phrase which occurs no less than 53 times in the book! This phrase is explained partly by listing those photographers whose work supposedly shows the process of realising 'personal truths'. The phrase appears to be synonymous with the 'creative photography' movement which came to flower during the 1970s (2) and which WB distinguishes from the 'colour or staged photography' of the 1980's (p11). Now why it should be that the use of colour or staging disqualifies work from being 'personal' is never made clear. Why are the b/w 'staged' bondage photos of Irving Klaw or the colour photos of Nan Golding not 'personal'? I'd have thought they were about as 'personal' as you can get.
Now I have no quarrel with WB or anyone else saying: 'Here are the photographers who I like, and that's all there is to it'. But that is not enough for WB - strangely, given his emphasis on the personal and the subjective. His canon is of photographers who 'realise personal truths'. But what does this mean?(3)
Chapter 5 'Defining Personal Truths' begins as follows:
'A photograph can be considered as an equation which includes the two factors of subjectivity and objectivity. This idea has been neatly expressed by John Blakemore: "The photograph occupies a space, makes connection between our interior and exterior worlds."' (p40)
Leaving aside the typical equivocation of 'can be considered' - what does this tell us? It is, sort of, true. But the quote remains as true if we substitute 'fried egg' for 'photograph'. After all, a fried egg is a thing in the world of a particular composition, but also a thing in my world - I think of other fried eggs, of how a fried egg occupies a different gastronomic space to a boiled egg ... and so on. But if the same can be said of a fried egg as of a photograph then we have an equation: A fried egg is the same as a photograph (this is what 'equation' means).
So this banality does not help us much. WB then moves on to a claim which is clear, straightforward and utterly false. He points out that different people see the world somewhat differently - not a surprising claim. He goes on to discuss the work of Raymond Moore and observes that without him (Moore) his work would not exist - again, not surprising. But WB goes on to claim that this is: 'true in a way that would not be true for "objective documentary photographs" which anyone conversant with the relevant conventions could produce.'(p42)
This is a truly staggering and insulting way to define 'personal photography'. Its purpose is to elevate the kind of work reproduced in Realising Personal Truths from ... well ... from everything else.
It is - at best - dubious as to whether 'anyone conversant with the relevant conventions' could produce the work of __________ [replace the blank with anyone who could be called a producer of 'objective documentary photographs']. But it is absolutely true that 'anyone conversant with the relevant conventions' can produce the sort of work which constitutes WB's canon. Just look at the works reproduced in his book, look at the photographs in the recent Swiss Cottage exhibition! Then consider the following, from Ch7 'Exploring Personal Truths':
'Competitive exhibitions and certain club activities do tend to encourage and support a kind of predatory one-upmanship which leads, if anywhere, to personal stagnation rather than growth ... [it] is more like visual game-playing ... [in which they are] amusing themselves and their fellow enthusiasts'(p53).If this applies to the kind of work produced in, for example, The British Journal of Photography Annual then on what grounds does it not apply to the tradition valorised by WB?
For this tradition there is actually only one convention. This fact was the most important thing which I learnt at art school. There was an implicit ethic that you can produce what you like. But behind this there was a secret convention - only mentioned when flouted: a work must be open to many or any interpretations, it must not make definite and unequivocal statements, it must not impose on the viewer, it must be 'personal'. This was forcefully brought home to me by a well-known entrepreneur and teacher in the world of 'independent' photography, who appears in WB's book. I had presented a slide-show of objects which were important to me. Some of them were books. He asked me rhetorically, in the outraged tone of a sit-com 'Jewish mother': "Have you ever heard of any important photographer taking pictures of books?!" This, from a man who would say to seminar groups that: 'What matters is what you want!'
WB - in a way - accepts this in his comment that a quotation from Minor White 'sounds like a licence to print photographs of apparently nothing in particular'(p42). WB accepts this in that his concern is not really at all with photographs as objects; it is with the process of making them. One of the most astonishing features of this book, written as it is by a photography critic, is the complete absence of the category of the aesthetic(4). The purpose of 'personal photography' is not about a result, it is about a process: self-transformation.
I've no problem with the idea that making photographs can be a means of self-transformation. But if this is all there is to the question of value in photography then the specificity of photography evaporates. Because the same is true of the act of frying eggs (in terms of what is actually offered in the self-transformation supermarket it is not much of a parody to imagine a guru offering workshops on 'Zen and the art of frying eggs').
WB compares the attendance at a photography workshop (not, of course, what your 'hobbyists' do) with 'a visit to a psychoanalyst'. Here, he is correct in two ways. Firstly, neither Bishopian proponents of photography as self-transformative, nor shrinkery in its many varieties see any need to produce evidence for their claims of transformativeness. Secondly, the worlds of 'creative' photography and of shrinkery pretend to openness and tolerance - they actually, ontologically, have hidden judgmental criteria which are all the more rigid and authoritarian for being secret.
Now there's a 'personal truth' for you.