Silence Will Do Just As Well
“What particular questions you ask; where you need to keep asking questions; what is in the center of attention, what on the periphery, and what in the darkness outside; in what circumstances and to what exact extent clarity and explicitness are good things, and in what circumstances mere approximation — silence — will do just as well; none of any of this was written in stone, inherently in the human breast, in the starry heavens…”
“Was philosophy a response to questions, which, although they arose contingently and were constantly changing, were questions to which we needed a response (which philosophy, or even, “only philosophy” could give)? Or was it a free aesthetic activity?”
[quotes taken out of context from an article, Richard Rorty at Princeton: Personal Recollections by Raymond Geuss ]
Is it really necessary or even useful to talk about the philosophy of photography? Consider this analogy.
I live on a mountainous, undeveloped piece of land behind which are two thousand acres of total wilderness (owned sequentially by various non-local timber companies). When I moved here, about eighteen years ago, that two thousand acres was totally unknown to me. There are a few old logging roads, but most of it has neither roads nor trails of any kind. I could have stayed in my house, in my garden, close to home and have never explored that wild unknown. Or, I could, bit by bit, learn my way around it. That’s what I did. Took me about a year to feel fully confident that I know my way to and from any point in the two thousand acres, and I’m still learning the details of what’s in there (and will surely never learn it all).
Point being, that doing it that way — sort of groping around in the dark until I, bit by bit, built up the mental map needed to find my way around — should be a last resort (there was and is nobody else living who knows the land beyond the logging roads). If there are people who know the way, if there are maps, or advice, or any kind of existing prior or on-going knowledge of where you want to go, then it’s surely worth asking instead of reinventing the wheel all by yourself.
To answer this post’s leading questions, no, you don’t need to verbalize your philosophy of photography — you can probably find your way by yourself. But it’s quicker, more efficient, richer, and possibly beyond what you will do by yourself — to interact in philosophical discussions about what, where, why you are wanting to go if you decide to strke out into terrain that is unknown to you.
To continue my analogy, for example, now that I have the knowledge, I could tell other people what I have learned about the land behind me. The highlights, the dangers, the ways in and out; that if you go up High Top mountain when there is a low, well-defined cloud cover, you can stand with your feet in the daylight and your head in the racing clouds; that it’s not a good idea to cut the chain holding the top of a poacher’s forty foot tree-stand attached to the downhill side of a tree on a nearly vertical mountain – while sitting in said tree-stand; that snakes are rare and bears are common; that both mother deer and mother turkeys will bluff-charge you when they have newborns nearby; that whether you like being completely alone when a long way from any kind of civilization depends on your nature. That exploring the unknown is so much better than sittiing safely at home…
-Julie
