Uncommon Fictions

Fiction and nonfiction are categories not often applied to photography, but on the heels of reading Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman I find myself thinking about photographs through her literary lens. Malcolm’s book, about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, explores the complicated nature of writing biography. With detective-like analysis, Malcolm scrutinizes the stories that have been told about Plath’s relationship to Hughes, and reveals how subjective a record even the most thorough biography ends up being—one that invariably says as much about the biographer as it does about their subject. The trouble, as Malcolm points out, is that when it comes to real life, there is always more to the story: another perspective, another version, another memory of how things went. “In a work of nonfiction,” she writes, “ we almost never know the truth of what happened. The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports what is going on in his imagination.” Malcolm is talking here the world beyond the frame. In a work of fiction, there is no world other than the one we are given. We might be tempted to imagine what comes next for our most beloved fictional characters, but in reality they do not live beyond their last page. In nonfiction the opposite is true. There are many versions on any one event, and those versions converge to give us some sense of occurrence, and of history. (This is made more complicated by how unreliable our memories and our eyes can be.) When we read a story drawn from true events, we are getting a perspective not the perspective. There is a whole world, filled with different, often contradictory tellings, that lie beyond the story’s frame.

I found this idea to be particularly apt when applied to photography, in part because of photography’s relationship—perhaps even dependance on—the visible world. Though the medium has worked to cast off its relationship to truth, it still struggles, I think, to shed its relationship to visible reality. (This is to some degree true of film as well, where actors can easily come to be associated with the characters they play.) When faced with a landscape, for example, one might still be most tempted to ask: “Where was that taken?” This question, when asked of an image, treats a photograph as window rather than object—as something to be looked through, not at.

When I applied Malcolm’s sentences to photography I found myself thinking—somewhat ironically—about two paintings: Claude Monet’s Cliff Walk at Pourville and Paul Signac’s Road to Gennevilliers. Both painting are referenced in Stephen Shore’s essay, “Form and Pressure,” because of what they illustrate about perspective and about the relationship between form and content. About the Signac, Shore writes: “It seems at once both random and balanced, almost photographic both in the way the tree on the right is cut off by the frame, and in the way that tree’s shadow is treated with the same attention as any object in the picture.” In composing the image this way, Shore says, Signac is transcending the conventions of his era—finding a new frame. What drew me back to these two paintings was the attention Shore gives to the tree at the edge of Signac’s frame. The partial image of the tree suggests that the scene is part of the visual world, and that it extends beyond the edge of the image, as if we might fold out another panel and see more of the world. Of course, there is nothing more. There is nothing beyond the edge of the frame.

Claude Monet, Cliff Walk at Pourville, 1882

Paul Signac, Road to Gennevilliers, 1883

But why does Shore describe Signac’s painting as “almost photographic?” It’s true the image looks like a photograph that might be taken some eighty years later (maybe by Shore). But he draws specific attention to the tree and its shadow. What I can infer, based on the details he’s focused on, is that Shore sees a distinction between the form of photographs and the form of paintings (acknowledging both that these terms are too general and that each medium can adopt the form of the other). Painters—specifically in the period Shore references—tended toward a form that contained the image. This is illustrated by the Manet, which suggests only that the cliffside continues into infinity in either direction. The painting feels plucked from the world, separated from it. Any unnecessary details—if there were any—have been removed, left absent by the painter. The details in the Signac—the tree, the shadow—are almost photographic because they remain; they are details from the real world that a photograph, taken from the same perspective, would need to reckon with. In this way, the image feels part of the word—framed off, yes, but still bound to the surroundings it’s been drawn from.

Now is it fair to think of this difference—between painting and photography—as a distinction between fiction and nonfiction? Probably not. But when I read Malcolm, my mind went to Shore’s essay, and to his photographs. I wanted to find out why.

In an essay about Shore’s work, Lynne Tillman writes: “Throughout its short history, photographers have fought for their medium to be considered an art, not just a visionless recording of what appeared in front of a camera lens. Anyone couldn’t take a great picture. A photograph wasn’t just about mimesis.” Shore’s photographs seek not to simply represent the world but to reorient the viewer, and in doing so, reveal the world in a new way.

Near the end of Form and Pressure Shore wonders if he, like Signac, can cast off his inherited frame. “I asked myself if I could structure the picture in a way that communicated my experience standing there, taking in the scene in front of me.” He writes this about his photograph Beverly Boulevard & La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 22, 1975. I’m drawn to the words “my experience standing there.” Shore’s images have the affect of putting you in his shoes. The perspectives often feel as if taken from his eye level—whether we are looking out at an intersection, or down at a burger and fries. He is quite intentionally positioning the viewer—offering a perspective. Looking again at his image from Beverly Boulevard, I can almost feel the breeze, hear the cars honking. It becomes easy, in my mind, to let stories spill out from the picture. For Tillman, too. She builds a narrative just from looking at Shore’s Commercial Avenue, Cairo, Illinois, MAY 10, 1974. “This isn’t what the photograph represents;” Tillman writes, after sharing her imagined tale, “still, I could pin the narrative to its surface, like an ornament. There is no inherent story in the photograph, other than its composition.” Because of Shore’s perspective, fictions are easy to conjure. In this way, I wonder if Shore’s photographs blur the lines between fiction and nonfiction—lines that, in literature, seem to blur more each day. Using narrative tools, Shore reorients us and allows us to adopt his point of view. He acknowledges a world beyond the frame, even gestures toward it—enough for us to smell the air, hear the hum of traffic, feel the heat radiating off the pavement. And then, looking at the image, we let our minds wander; we tell stories about the world within and beyond the frame. From Shore’s perspective we find—or perhaps reveal—our own.

Stephen Shore, Beverly Boulevard & La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 22, 1975