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Charles Harbutt: Photography as a Reality High

Charles Harbutt: Photography as a Reality High

Credit Charles Harbutt Archive/Center for Creative Photography

Slide Show
View Slide Show15 Photographs

Charles Harbutt: Photography as a Reality High

Charles Harbutt: Photography as a Reality High

Credit Charles Harbutt Archive/Center for Creative Photography

Charles Harbutt: Photographer, Teacher, Mentor

Charles Harbutt, a former president of Magnum Photos, died overnight Monday in Monteagle, Tenn., where he was conducting a photography workshop. He was 79 and had been suffering from emphysema, his wife, the photographer Joan Liftin, said.

Mr. Harbutt influenced generations of younger photographers as a teacher and a mentor. He left Magnum to form Archive Pictures with Ms. Liftin, Mary Ellen Mark, Abigail Heyman and Mark Godfrey. Soon after, Jeff Jacobson became a partner. Mr. Jacobson had first encountered Mr. Harbutt at a 1974 workshop in upstate New York. Those few days listening to Mr. Harbutt led Mr. Jacobson to quit his job as a lawyer for a “life of adventure and poverty,” he said.

“Charlie was one of the first people teaching workshops, and he became very, very influential,” Mr. Jacobson said. “He and Burk Uzzle took photojournalism and pushed it in a direction away from literalism or classicism, away from certainly the European paradigm of Cartier-Bresson and away from the narrative paradigm of Gene Smith to something very, very different, very involved with metaphor. That was hugely influential.”

As Mr. Harbutt moved from photojournalism to pursuing more personal work, he also influenced Alex Webb, who attended a workshop with him as a 20-year-old student.

“He believed that photography was a unique visual language that cannot be expressed in words,” Mr. Webb said. “As a matter of fact, if it could be expressed in words, then it wouldn’t be worth doing.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Harbutt wrote about photography with great insight, as embodied in the afterword of the 1974 book “Travelog.” It is titled “I Don’t Take Pictures, Pictures Take Me.”

The following excerpts are from the book.


Fifteen years ago, I stopped being a writer and became a photographer. On a sweltering New York August day, I was writing about winter in Japan. Writers, it seemed, didn’t have to go to the places they wrote about because there is no relationship between the written word and anything that ever existed except the imagination of the writer: nothing in the medium, in the nature of the act of writing.

I became a photographer because photographers did have to be wherever they wanted to take pictures, or at least their cameras did. And because there was some connection, inherent in the nature of the medium, between that place and its picture. And the viewers, despite any pitfalls or roadblocks put in their way, could still to some extent be there too. This has always struck me as somewhat amazing: That magic little box enables one to leave, in a small way and for a short while, one’s own time and space and to occupy, maybe only superficially, another time and space: a then and there that really existed as well as a here and now. Photographs are both real images and imaged realities. This is both unique among media and new in human experience.

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Charlie in a cafe.Credit Courtesy of Joan Liftin

Photography is the result of a balancing act of film, lens, shutter, and light bouncing off something. The photographic image derives directly from, in fact is caused by, whatever objects are in front of the lens. But by this very act, a lens sometimes distorts the lines of the object. And even without this distortion, the lens makes an image which has a separate physical reality from the real object which caused it. So at the same time, a photograph is an experience in and of itself and can preserve some aspects of the direct perception of reality and in fact of reality itself. Photography is the only two-dimensional visual medium that simultaneously has this inherent relationship between thing made and thing in reality, and its uniqueness springs from the tension between image and reality.

“Photography is a reality high. It comes from that impulse which makes one turn and say: ‘Hey, did you see that?’ ”

Charles Harbutt

We are now confronted with a medium that can do something no other medium can. Photography can give us a two-dimensional delineation of the real world. It is the closest human technology has come to reproducing (and therefore sharing) that aspect of life known as visual perception. A photograph is able to preserve, like the memory, the raw material, the input data of one’s human experience of life or at least what one person considered memorable enough to point a camera at.

Photography is a reality high. It comes from that impulse which makes one turn and say: “Hey, did you see that?” On one level, it is the photographer’s experience of reality speaking directly to his viewer’s experience of reality. Art is the imagination of the artist speaking directly to the viewer’s imagination.

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Quai Voltaire. Paris. 1975.Credit Charles Harbutt Archive/Center for Creative Photography

Photography is not art. Atget had the right idea when he refused to exhibit his photographs in an art gallery. He had a little sign on his door saying, “Documents pour artistes.” Although photography freed painting from its need to depict reality and so unleashed art’s century-long exploration of itself, photographers adopted the standards and strictures of the French Academy. When that style became passé, photographers began their pell-mell, helter-skelter, Keystone Kops chase of artists down through art history: through romanticism, impressionism, dadaism, futurism, abstractionism, pop, op and now into conceptualism. We’ve had shows of photography as printmaking and as sculpture, as eggs and as tacos. Unfortunately, the “art” photographers are suspiciously behind the painters by a few years. This “me-too” approach is not only undignified, not only visually and morally bankrupt, but antiphotographic in a very deep way.

“But the great photographer skates close to both brinks simultaneously and, in the process, frequently states new ways the problem can be perceived if not solved, new ways the rules can be broken if not observed.”

Charles Harbutt

Photography’s lack of self-respect would of course annoy George Bernard Shaw, who wrote: “When the photographer takes to forgery, the press encourages him. The critics, being professional connoisseurs of the shiftiest of the old makeshifts, come to the galleries where the forgeries are exhibited. They find to their relief that here, instead of a new business for them to learn, is a row of monochromes which their old jargon fits like a glove. Forthwith they proclaim that photography has become art.”

Photography is not art; it is something totally new in human experience, something people have not been able to do before the last century or so. And art critics and philosophers have reacted like the Pope to Galileo. Since the fact doesn’t fit the theory, jettison the fact.

Photography is not art because the basic impulse of the photographer is diametrically opposed to the basic impulse of the artist at least in one large respect. The artist tries to bring into existence something new that never had concrete existence before. The photographer tries to bring into existence something new that preserves something that already has concrete existence but will cease to exist in just that way in the next moment or day or year. And for Goethe, at least, the imagination for the real was imagination’s highest form. Perhaps photography is simply a higher stage in humanity’s artistic evolution from that first hand-drawn, cave-hidden deer. And critics are known to be dinosaurs.

When the eyes are open, an awareness of dreams and the interior life is still possible, but awareness of the external world is possible only with open eyes. And therefore, the fullest experience of life is possible only when one is awake and with open eyes, out on the streets of the world.

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Credit Courtesy of Joan Liftin

This sense of quickness, of being alive on this earth, of simple orgasmic sense perception, is the point at which great photographs are made. Photographs come from that moment in the process of cognition before the mind has analyzed meaning or the eyes design and at which the experience and the person experiencing are fully, intuitively, existentially there. Such images look like photographs, not paintings: there is a tremendous sense of stopped time, of the blinking shutter, of being alive and still there, of discovery (rather than analysis), of chance, not design, of quick emotion from an uncertain cause. Photography is at its best when it deals with the very act of seeing in itself and not with recollections in tranquility or dilettantism of design.

The moment of creation in photography is similar to a state of consciousness very much sought after in yoga. Or Gestalt therapy. It is to be at the exact center of one’s being, where an awareness of everything going on inside oneself — in fantasy, memory, emotions and thought — is balanced by sensitivity to what is happening outside the person and what it means and feels and is. If a photographer can become sufficiently aware of this continuum and have the energy to push a shutter when inside and outside click together, that camera might produce some very fine photographs indeed. And they would be unique and original (good or bad) because the particular way the world would fall into space from that camera angle could not be seen by any other camera. One couldn’t occupy the same physical space. And because that particular continuum is totally personal. And because a person is different from moment to moment. As is the world. But all one’s photographs would share that unique personal way of being alive, and it is this being-aliveness that viewers can respond to.

The photographic goal flows from the nature of the medium. Photography is the only medium that originates in and is caused by the real, historical, time-space event of a collision between a man, a camera and reality. But the photograph itself occupies its own time and space and is a separate thing from that real-time collusion. Most photographers see only one or the other of those aspects of the medium. Documentary, news, and street photographers see mainly the reality, the content or subject. “Artistic” and academic photographers see mainly the image, its style, technique, and fantasy associations. Great photographs exist not so much where image and reality meet and balance, but in the electric tension between real and unreal. The good photographer skates as close to the brink of total realism, while still honoring the otherness of the image, or he skates as close to otherness — the sheer, unique, two-dimensional object — while never leaving the direct realism of which the medium is capable. But the great photographer skates close to both brinks simultaneously and, in the process, frequently states new ways the problem can be perceived if not solved, new ways the rules can be broken if not observed. The result is a two-dimensional image that is a separate experience in itself while totally authentic to the real continuum which gave it birth.

Beyond that, for me, it is a question of how much. Was it worth doing? How many photographic balls was the photographer able to juggle at once: How deep a perception of being alive? How rich an emotion? How sensuous an experience? How elegant a line or tone or technique? Or how inelegant? How real? How unreal? How surreal? A camera is a filter through which the reality of an existential moment (the world plus the camera plus all of the person) pours onto the film, which preserves the visual aspects of that moment as photographed from where you are, physically as well as in terms of awareness and depth.

Writing about a visual medium tends to make the simple complex. If you want to make photographs, all you do is point the camera at whatever you wish; click the shutter whenever you want. If you want to judge a good photograph, ask yourself: Is life like that? The answer must be yes and no, but mostly yes.


The work of Mr. Harbutt is represented by Peter Fetterman Gallery in Los Angeles.

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