IT IS TRUE of course that one of the oldest traditions in photography is the taking of photographs which portray the odd and exotic. This is the information-gathering aspect of photography. In the nineteenth century the search for the exotic had led brave men like Frances Frith up the farthest reaches of the Nile and Samuel Bourne 18,000 feet up the Himalayas. The initial impulse for these projects sprang from a legitimate curiosity about the things of this world, a world, which due to the limits of transportation, was still largely unknown. We forget in the modern world, where everything is accessible to everything else, where helicopters routinely land on the top of mountains, where “information” can be instantly retrieved, where already millions of images have accumulated in both our archives and our memories, that in the nineteenth century, a person, providing he had a curiosity, would have very few restraints placed upon him. Knowing as much as we do, we lose joy of getting to know. A hundred years ago the shape of the modern world was taking place in our minds, and this had greatly to do with a photographic quest for the exotic, the unknown.

But the modern manner of taking photographs — not of the exotic, but of the merely odd — is a different matter altogether. It is similar to the difference which exists between the nineteenth-century notion of “taking the tour” and the modern notion of tourism. The issue is one of seeing slowly, or rather, of not seeing too quickly. As moderns, we simply see too quickly, which is a way of saying we don’t see at all. Our camera sees for us: it frames up a scene (a family, a historic building, a landscape), converts it into a two-dimensional image by the push of a button, and allows us to live under the illusion that in “having” something (a photograph) we have “done” something (an experience). And we learn too quickly too — for no matter how hard the apologists for the high-tech industries try to convince us that “knowing” is the same thing as having information at our instant disposal, nothing of value has ever been learned except by enduring the tests of time, its cruelty and its surprises. No painting can be seen and comprehended quickly, and no woman can be loved too rapidly. This is as true as anything I know. That which is rapid and accelerated may be necessary to people who have to speed things up for the purpose of making money or scoring some kind of goal, but it has nothing to do with the act of “knowing.”

The modern tourist, having become saturated with images of the “unknown” world, is really without a curiosity, that is, without a passion for the unknown world. An earlier curiosity for the exotic, hungry and innocent, has given way to the legitimate feeling that the world is too much known, the world has become boring. And this is especially true in America where a large and depressing conventionality, amounting almost to the blunting of curiosity itself, dominates the national psyche. But who can blame us? Since our birth we have been overwhelmingly subjected to the insistence and presence of images, an insistence which has ended up destroying our interest in photographs themselves, or anyway, in the content of photographs — which happens to be the world itself. Buy our camera and tickets, charge through the landscapes of Europe in an air-conditioned tour bus, wrap it all up in a week, file our slides and snaps in boxes labeled “Europe.” Done. We’ve done France. We might as well eat a meal in one bite in order to compliment the chef on his subtlety.

What is tragic in all this is that the truly exotic, the unusual, and the unknown still exist in our world, but we have lost our capacity for them. Our assumption is that we know our world, that because communication has improved, so, too, has our knowledge of things. Instead we have become like those friends of mine who took speed-reading courses because they wanted to hurry the process of understanding. The result was that even though they could read Moby-Dick in a day and retain for a few weeks a breezy recollection of the whole book, their involvement in the tale came to nothing — whereas other friends of mine slowly endured the book, crawled through it, sometimes taking weeks, savoring the odd Elizabethan language and allowing the mythic elements of Ahab’s search for the white whale to illuminate their own quests. Eventually, the speed-readers, in order to explain their own lack of interest in Ahab’s obsession, decided the book was an exotic antique and went into various high-speed occupations like advertising or “communications.” I can’t say that my other friends became poets, but it is remarkable how few of them became frauds.

(What a journey I was on, sitting on the bench in Central Park. Yet all around me were the signs that I was on to something. Just over the wall I could hear nothing but the steady honking of cars stuck at red lights, not even stuck, just stopped for a few seconds — the sound of acceleration, of anxiety, of tedium, of purposeless agitation, like cows on drugs. And who was I, resting now on a park bench, having run up and down the city in search of some fugitive image?)

It seemed to me (as the bird-woman fed her birds once again, no tourist with a camera in sight) that the speeding up of things had cost us nothing less than our real curiosity for real things as well as our respect for the differences among those things. Photographs, those bright rectangles, had somehow managed to replace experience, unshapeable except by the best part of ourselves; images of mystery had replaced the long, arduous course of mystery itself. What American child wouldn’t rather go to Disneyland than to France? We see things so quickly that we begin to prefer only those things which are quick to experience — romance novels, simple and cynical art, fast sports, video games, cocaine, and my own private lament, bad photographs; namely those meaningless large-format “nature” photographs which are nothing more than a sentimentalizing of the disappearing American landscape — or even worse, that species of “documentary” photograph, taken by white, middle-class photographers, of the sad and the derelict, usually black, men and women too ill to smash the lens or too ignorant to question the motives of a person with six hundred dollars worth of equipment around his neck.

Sitting in the park, myself a tourist watching other tourists go by, I realized that a hunger for images of an unknown world had given way to a delight in the picturesque, a much milder form of curiosity. The distinction seems minute, but underneath it I caught a glimpse of an immense loss. One of the richest traditions in photography, the venture into the unknown, had been converted into ogling. The tourist with a camera, almost anybody with a camera, was not taking photographs out of a wonder for what he didn’t know; that was long gone. This photographer believed he knew all he needed to know — from there on out it was easy wonder and easy laughter. What our tourist was trying to take home with him was a real old lady in a park who had been converted into a two-dimensional joke. The hidden statement beneath the photograph he would take was really a remark, and it went something like this: “New York is filled with oddballs. This is one of them.” Uncurious about the real woman, he snaps her picture to validate the normality of his own life. She has become exotic to him because nothing else is. It is from the deadest places inside ourselves that we take most of our photographs. Going neither to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, nor to the bottom of ourselves, we settle for the exoticism of class, the hills and valleys which exist between us and our fellow citizens, the poor, the drunk, the confused. Make no mistake about it (I told myself), these photographs are not meant to illuminate whoever will look at them someday. This is not Walker Evans looking as closely as anyone ever looked at something he had never seen before. This is the high-speed American with high-speed film taking a quick snap of an actual woman as if she was a weird-looking building or a pretty sunset.

Was a soul being stolen? I didn’t know.

AS I WATCHED the old lady in black continue to fuss with her birds, I saw — this day was a day for seeing! — that even though she might seem exotic to the tourist with the camera, she obviously didn’t seem exotic to herself. Exoticism is not of those terms we apply to ourselves. It is always to some other person they apply, some person who is exotic when compared to us. At home with ourselves to some extent, we judge our acts to be commensurate with our needs. I don’t feed birds because I am strange, but because I am lonely or because I love birds or because my father raised them when I was a child or because I read Robinson Jeffers at the right time and remember his saying, “I’d rather kill a man than a hawk.” We always have our reasons which are concealed only from someone who is not ourself. To ourselves we are perfectly clear; only others, with their concealed intentions, their unexplained behavior, seem opaque.

Unless she was chasing off a tourist with a camera, the bird-woman seemed quite sane, sitting on her bench and chatting with the birds.

In fact, from her own point of view, she was doing exactly what she wanted to do. It was the tourists who were crazy. And in what way? Well, in my real willingness to be sitting there in Central Park, sensing the early tidings of a world about to unflower, free of concerns which could never include this woman, I found myself in sympathy with her, not in the intellectual sense of being on her side, but rather as if I could see through her eyes, as if her difficulties were my difficulties. That’s not an easy thing to do; it requires something akin to sleep, a drifting kind of wakefulness, and it’s especially hard for someone like myself who lives too often in the abstract world where thinking about someone means not thinking like them. But here in my leisure, floating among my thoughts, willing to be slow and then slower, proceeding snail-like beside what seemed like a large glimpse of how things are, I wrote a monologue in my head which came from this woman’s need but used my words. It went something like this:

How can you maintain a friendship with birds, how can you maintain anything with birds, if someone is taking your picture? It is this constant interference at my peripheral line of vision, my concentration! To photograph me, someone “stops” me, not only literally on film by a shutter speed over which I have no control, but also by “stopping” the atmosphere around me. If, as I feed my birds, life is flowing around me, an afternoon or morning tidal flow, then a photographer breaks all that up, he interrupts the casualness of things. You see, it makes me self-conscious, which, when I am feeding birds, is nothing less than a crime. Do I need it? Content and cajoling, easy among my birds, doing nothing but what I want to do, I don’t need a photographer taking my picture. Should I be chronicled? What for? Before the photographers came, my friendship with the birds was without self-consciousness. This man, this person with a camera, has invaded my right to exist on my own peaceful terms. Friendship, remember, is never easy, not with your next-door neighbor, not with your brother, and certainly not with a park full of birds.

Was a soul being stolen? Suddenly I thought so. On every level possible this woman was going to lose. And she was going to lose big. She had already lost much. What she had worked out for herself in the middle of this difficult city, what friendship she had managed with a number of birds, what primitive means of assuagement was hers, was being ransacked by a legion of wide-eyed tourists with cameras. To them she could have been a creature in a zoo. Making her self-conscious, they destroyed her peace of mind, which is, after all, what we have to work with. Lacking all imagination (having no time for it, really) they pretended she was there for them and their hungry cameras, and they stole her image. For what use, we may ask? Only the worst. These tourists, like most Americans, assumed they knew what was what, what was proper behavior for a human being, what was not, what was beautiful, what was ugly. And they were out to build a monument to their assumptions. Each slide they took of the bird-woman, hell, each slide they took of the Grand Canyon, was another brick in place. This is crazy. This is pretty. This is poverty. This is an Indian.

IT TAKES YEARS to create any kind of real clarity. All that brave woman did for me was to end my search for a particular kind of photograph. Her refusal to accept gracefully the right of anybody to discredit her own eccentric world by the puny (yet momentous) act of taking her picture made me realize how unprotesting are the objects of our dangerous gaze. And also how truly unexamined is that gaze. As photographers, we find those persons most alien to our bourgeois training — the hapless, the homeless, the tacky, the truly marginal; that is, people most unlike ourselves — and we “document” them, as if the sole intention of their suffering and aimlessness was to earn them the right of becoming an “interesting” subject. In my own case, I knew that, if it was true that I no longer felt obliged to take photographs of “happy” children because such photographs told me little about the lives of children, I also had no reservations about taking “serious” photographs of strangers, men and women who would not protest against the categories in which I would (for the purposes of getting a grant or having an exhibition with a good title) place them — Ukranians of the East Village, transvestites, suburbanites, the Hopi Indians, the Irish. And yet when compared to the size of lives, to the actual differences which exist between people who might be “gay” or “Irish,” these images ended up telling me just as little about the lives of the people being photographed as did those photographs of children licking ice cream cones. These categories (nets) were purely academic puffs which disappeared two seconds after they were examined and so too did general agreeability, the false family-of-man atmosphere, which these categories almost automatically produce.

Learning what you don’t want to photograph is only half the battle, though a large half. It’s also the half which can be put into words. The other half — which consists of one’s photographs — can only be depleted by any attempt to set up a verbal equivalent of whatever power they may have, what intentions. However, I don’t mind saying that after I left the park that day — having observed for half an hour or so the old woman and her refusal to be photographed, and being chastened by my own realizations — I never took quite the same kind of photograph again. From that moment on I regarded the taking of a photograph as a personal act, as personal as the writing of a poem — deep and perilous, intellectual and beautiful. A photograph, or a grouping of them, would be as mysterious as this woman and as complicated as my own mind. I would never document anything. I would hope for luck, but I wouldn’t rely on it. I would hope not to diminish things.

I got up to leave. The old woman was still with her birds. She looked up at me quickly (having seen my camera bag), so I held my empty hands against my face, palms out. I couldn’t help but break into a laugh. And she laughed too, nodding her head vigorously, though not enough to disturb the birds.

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