Do photographs ever lie? Motion Potion
Do photographs ever lie? Motion Potion
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, July 01, 1987
I REMEMBER that as an aspiring young photographer, my most persistent enemy was motion. How terribly often perfectly wonderful photographs were ruined by a trembling wrist, an ill-timed sniffle, or an overly-eager finger thrust down hard on the shutter. One had to be rooted on firm ground, bark “hold it!” as emphatically as possible, then brace perfectly still for the exposure. To do less would be to court disaster in hopelessly blurred prints.
For years, stillness was in fact synonymous with good pictures. The advent of electronic flash photography, however, and then of infinitely faster lenses and shutters, brought on a new era of photographic possibilities, all emphasizing what might be called “freeze-frame motion” through the insinuation of dynamic tension and the very mechanics of movement. Stop-action photography dominated the journalistic trade from war correspondence to the sports page, and creative photographers like Ernst Haas and Duane Michals made an aesthetic of blur.
The current photo exhibition “Motion: A Celebration of Canada” (on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila until the 31st of July), does manage to provide us with a fractional glimpse into the mainstream of Canadian life and culture. But there is very little said here with or about motion itself that we have not already seen before.
To be sure, there are enough delightful images among the photographs in this collection to merit popular attention. But given the fatalism that characterizes so much of contemporary North American photography, these Canadian pictures are almost too mild-mannered and simplistic to be credible. And alongside our own recent brand of “committed” photography — snatched on the run admist automatic gunfire and a state of frenzied seige — they are almost sinfully self-indulgent.
Perhaps the comparison is altogether unfair, given the context in which the exhibition itself was compiled. In the first place, these are home-spun “contest pictures” of scenic westworld vintage, culled from over a thousand photographs entered in a national shoot-fest sponsored in part by Nikon of Canada. As such, they are pictures virtually made-to-order for the glossy pages of Popular Photography, excursions in praise of do-it-yourself camera wizardry. Then too, these are pictures probably taken by skilled hobbyists and parkbench professionals, snapped close to home and away from the harsh realities of human conflict.
As a result, “Motion” is as maddeningly wholesome as exhibits come, a celebration not only of a country’s blissful complacency, but also of its people’s abiding belief in the credibility of the good life. It has been said that few people in the world are as preoccupied with leisure and topography as are Canadians, and these images are cut to fit with a master-tailor’s shears.
I think that the main objection to exhibits like this deals mostly with their ability to lull us into a starry-eyed illusion of well-being—or at least to turn us green with envy and indignation. If God in His heaven were to assess the state of creation based on these photographs, He might be excused for thinking that all is well with mankind. And we in the Third World know that that can’t possibly be right.
Do photographs ever lie? Personally, I think they do most convincingly by being all-too-willing vessels for half-truths.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Do photographs ever lie? Motion Potion” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, July 01, 1987
