"Photography, Fishing, and the Ones That Get Away" by Rob Silberman
Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.
-- Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Introduction,” The Decisive Moment
It seems appropriate that this project, originating in Minnesota, should have a title that suggests a fish story. The Land of 10,000 Lakes probably has witnessed 10,000,000 fish get away, with a story for each one. No doubt each story lovingly and painfully recalls the size of the escapee, miraculously increasing with each retelling; the heroic efforts of the angler; and the unhappy circumstances that allowed the fish to live another day and the fisherman or woman to mourn the tragic episode forever after. If there’s one thing that could unite Minnesotans besides talking about the weather and the Minnesota Vikings’ failure to win a Super Bowl, it’s probably the shared belief that there’s nothing like a good fish story about the one that got away.
Maybe now, with this publication, a good photographic story about the one that got away will be considered equally engaging. There are plenty of anecdotes about how great photographs were made, but not so many recounting how a great photograph, or a personally important one, was not made. Harry Mattison, back in the day, used to say that when there was no film in the camera or it had not been properly loaded, and you did not wind up with the shot you thought you had made, you were practicing Zen photography. These photographic stories exist somewhere between that admirably philosophical response and what I imagine as the more down-to-earth and not to be quoted response uttered when a Minnesotan realizes another fish has made a getaway.
Everyone who has tried photography probably has at least one good, sad tale of a picture that does not exist but “coulda, shoulda, woulda.” The stories presented in The One That Got Away show what a thoughtful bunch professional photographers are, and what good storytellers they can be. Some of the reasons for the missing photographs one might expect: no film or digital storage card, wrong film (color, not black and white), jammed shutter (actually two; double the frustration), film lost at the lab. Then there are the more edgy tales of film seized by security personnel and of intended subjects apparently not where they were thought to be—information communicated with more than a hint of antagonism, even intimidation. And some situations border on the metaphysical. The universe seems to offer up an especially luscious opportunity and then—shades of the football, Lucy, and Charlie Brown in Peanuts—snatches it away, turning the decisive moment into the decisive moment missed.
Such a loss is not the same as the fate of an artistic masterpiece stolen or destroyed, because the photograph never actually existed. It survives only in non-pictorial form, in the memory of the photographer and in the telling, through an act of verbal description, not visual creation. The stories could be Agatha Christie mysteries, all with the title “The Case of the Missing Photograph”—except that the photograph is not missing and then found, perhaps through the application of Hercule Poirot’s little gray cells. It is missing because never made. Maybe the tales are closer to ghost stories, testaments to a haunting, unreal existence.
What is perhaps surprising is that so many of these stories do not follow the basic disaster plot, but move on to larger matters. Instead of describing the picture that got away and stopping there, some contributors address the significance of having one get away. Chip Schilling notes that the photograph can be made but something can still be missed, if the emotion and mood of the moment is not adequately captured. Others consider the question of what it means to deliberately let one get away: photographic catch-and-release that never even gets to the “catch” part. When Vance Gellert finds himself in a situation where the cosmos is going wild all around him and offering a once-in-a-lifetime visual spectacle, he realizes that the effort to record the scene would prove futile and turns to experiencing what he has been given to behold. Leaving aside the practical side of the decision, there is the fundamental issue of how we weigh the value of taking a picture against the value of experiencing the scene. Vance insists the experience did not get away: it still exists, in his mind.
For professionals that kind of situation in effect asks, What price photographic glory? The question usually arises in relation to photographs of war and disasters, and the depiction of human suffering. Are there pictures that could be overwhelming, but should not be taken? An intriguing variation appears in Rebecca Pavlenko’s recollection of a trip where the effort to record the journey led to a not very conscious recapitulation of the history of photography of the West, and losing track of her own personal experience and photographic vision. That particular version of photographs missed, not made or at least not made in a convincing fashion, is different from the more familiar version, where everything comes down to a painful choice. To photograph or not to photograph, that is the question, and photographic Hamlets can ponder those alternatives forever. In films and literary works that address the issue there are often only neat binary versions, where taking the photograph means not aiding a subject in peril. But the notion that photography means becoming detached from the world instead of experiencing life, or saving lives, is not necessarily convincing. Sometimes intervening photographically prevents harm by introducing a witness and the possibility of a record that can expose wrongdoing. And sometimes making the photograph and communicating the results is an important human, even humanitarian act.
Still, Ellie Kingsbury’s observation concerning her photographic devotion— “I missed out on BEING”—reveals a photographer seriously questioning whether making a photograph should always be the ultimate goal, a self-evident good. When is choosing not to take a photograph the proper choice? The obvious answer is it depends: on the situation, the subject, the photographer, the stakes. If there can be value in using a camera and making a photograph, it can also be rewarding to follow Laurie Schneider’s dictum, “Life is to be savored through one’s own eyes.”
The Cartier-Bresson statement in the epigraph explains the urgency and intensity with which he approached the making of his split-second marvels. It also suggests the role of photography in serving memory, and the concerns that surround photographs made or not made, photographs that survive and photographs that get away. No photograph, no record; no record, no memory aid. Memory cannot create photographs but photographs can help (re)create memories. That is why people rescue family albums from burning houses, and why Sally Mars has regrets for photographs of her mother she did not make. Photography involves a fundamental play of presence and absence, because a photograph records a presence, but then becomes a reminder of an absence. The visual representation is not the same as the physical reality of the subject photographed. Yet it can be treasured as a record of the original subject and all the memories attached to it.
The handwritten texts in The One That Got Away underline the ambivalence of representation, its pleasures and its pains. They stand in for a picture we do not see and, in fact, could never see. It was an inspired idea to give the participants sheets of photographic paper, so that the recollection of the missing photograph takes the place of the missing image, with words instead of pictures—and handwritten words at that, which makes everything more personal.
A picture, as the truism has it, is worth a thousand words. In The One That Got Away photographers remind us that a thousand words—more or less—may be worth, or at least help make up for, a lost picture. They can also help us appreciate the photographs that do exist, did not get away, and do so much for our sense of the world and our lives.