The single frame was never the point.
New York, 2011. A restaurant a stone's throw from the Bowery. A hungry group of mature students gather after a gruelling day trying to unite light, colour and gesture into something that might earn an approving grunt from Jay Maisel. Ten of us round a table, mostly professional photographers. I had advanced since my first workshop with Jay, but I felt every inch a pretender. Still in thrall to Flickr, where everything is a 'great capture!!!' and the 'likes' get doled out like jelly beans. An instant sugar rush but not any meaningful kind of nourishment.
Duane Michals was also at that table. He had spoken to us as a group earlier and, such was my ignorance, I had no idea who he was. His wit was quick and dry, performative rather than warm, the sort that made people laugh and then left them faintly unsure whether they had been included or exposed. I felt as if I had been moved half an inch off centre.
He had not obviously witnessed my floundering, but it didn't matter; his eyes were the kind that didn't need to. They were piercing in the literal sense: pale, direct, unmoving, and they seemed to look through whatever version of themselves a person was presenting and register what was actually there. He was perfectly courteous. I was perfectly terrified.
Two artists died last week, two days apart, and on paper they had almost nothing in common. Michals in New York, of pneumonia, on the 9th June and David Hockney in London on the 11th. They were 94 and 88. They had each spent more than sixty years arguing, in their very different ways, with the photograph.
Hockney spent decades prodding at photography and never quite trusting it. Michals made his name with small staged sequences and lines of handwriting scrawled under the print. One painted beautiful swimming pools the colour of boiled sweets. The other shot grainy black-and-white parables about death and desire in borrowed rooms. At first glance you would not hang them in the same show. And yet they spent their long working lives picking away at the same loose thread, from opposite ends.
The thread was this. Photography's central article of faith was the single frame. One picture, one instant. The decisive moment that Cartier-Bresson taught two generations to wait for, finger hovering, until the geometry and the gesture collide and the shutter clicks. The whole romance of the medium sat in that sliver of a second. Get it right and you had caught something true. Miss it and it was gone for good.
Hockney thought this was nonsense, or close to it. A single photograph, he liked to point out, has no time in it. It is a lie about how we see. The eye does not register a rectangle in 1/125th of a second; it roves, returns, accumulates, corrects. So in the early eighties he started making what he called joiners. He would photograph a room, a road, his mother sitting in a chair, not once but a hundred times, and assemble the prints into a single ragged picture, edges not quite meeting, the same hand appearing twice. Many glances stitched into one, put back together the way the eye actually builds a scene. He was trying to put the time back in. The single frame was never the point for him, and the camera, for all that he used it constantly, was a tool he held at arm's length from himself as a painter.
Michals came up against the same wall from a different angle. Where Hockney distrusted the frozen instant because it killed time, Michals distrusted it because it could only show the surface of things. He had also arrived in the same era of the decisive moment, the silver-gelatin certainty that one frame at one fraction of one second could carry the meaning of a life, and he didn't believe it for a minute. He felt the photograph, on its own, was silent about the things he most wanted to say. He was after what the camera cannot photograph: a thought, a soul leaving a body, the precise moment love arrives, and the equally precise moment it is already gone. None of that fits in one frame. So he began to sequence the images, because one frame could not hold the story and he was, by his own account, a writer who happened to take pictures.
When even that was not enough he wrote on them in his own hand. Not titles, not captions. A voice. Sometimes confessional, sometimes wry, sometimes addressed to the viewer as if from somewhere just behind the frame. The handwriting is the thing people remember, but it is worth being clear about what it was for. It was not decoration. It was completion. The image, for Michals, was the beginning of the sentence. What he could not see mattered to him far more than what he could. For a photographer, that is close to heresy.
So we might say that Hockney stood slightly outside photography and used it as one material among many, while Michals stayed inside it and refused its supposed muteness. Two temperaments, opposite directions, the same conclusion: that the photograph is a made thing, not a found one. Neither thought one picture could hold what they wanted to say.
The cult of the single image is still alive and well, and it is certainly not only Cartier-Bresson's doing. The single-entry competition. The print on the wall, sold and signed, complete in itself. The show-stopping landscape hauled back from some unfeasibly remote place and held up as a trophy. We are trained to think of the masterpiece as a single object that either works or does not, and to measure our progress by how many of those objects we can produce.
I admire the work of both men enormously. Collaging together a collection of images in one frame à la Pearblossom Hwy is now a fairly simple operation in Photoshop, at least technically. Obviously when Hockney did it, it was not simple at all. The difficulty was not only technical; it was perceptual. He was not making a collage effect. Each small print had to be made, held, placed, moved, doubted, and made to argue with its neighbours. He was trying to build an image that behaved more like looking.
That distinction matters. I am not especially interested in reproducing a collage for its own sake. I am interested in the permission behind it: the idea that the photograph can be interrupted, extended, contradicted, and still remain true.
Mark-making on photographic images is arguably far more challenging. The first time I made marks on one of my own prints, it felt gratuitous. That is the precise word. The print was finished. Finished and not to be defaced. And I was about to do exactly that. I felt I had no licence, that I had not earned the right. The marks were childish, indulgent, destructive, or all three. I put the idea aside for a long time.
What I am slowly coming to understand – through reading, through teaching, through researching in order to write – is that the permission is earned by the looking. By studying the work of artists who broke the surface before you, and understanding why they broke it, until the breaking is no longer gratuitous because it has a reason. Michals wrote on the print because the image alone could not say what he meant. Hockney shattered it into fragments because the single frame lied about vision. Neither asked if it was legitimate. Both had done so much looking that the question of permission had become irrelevant.
Meaning doesn't often arrive that cleanly. A thought worth having often needs more than one frame to turn around in. Hockney needed a hundred Polaroids to describe one afternoon with his mother. Michals needed six exposures and a paragraph to say something about grief. The single picture is a wonderful thing. But it is a word, not the essay, and some ideas are simply too big.
This, I think, is what the two of them leave us with, set side by side this week. The print is raw material. The hand and the word and the brush, the wax or the ink, the second image and the third ... none of them are impertinences upon a sacred surface. They are the work continuing to happen. Many of us who came up through photography's traditional channels were trained to think of the print as a verdict. It isn't. It is a clause. What we add to it is the rest of the sentence.
Michals's eyes were not the gatekeeper's eyes I took them for at the time. They were the eyes of a man who had spent his life looking until he had earned the right to write whatever he wanted across the surface of a photograph. The terror was mine to feel. The permission was always there for the taking.
If you have ever felt that your strongest single image says less than the messier group of pictures around it, you already know where this goes. The series is where the thinking lives. Not because more is always better. Some things only become visible across several frames, in the rhyme between them, in the gap one leaves that the next one fills, in the marks laid over the surface afterwards. So this week, in memory of two men who would have argued about everything except this, take a thought you have been trying to force into one perfect photograph and stop forcing it. Give it three frames instead, or seven, or a hundred. Let them disagree with each other. See what shows up in the seams that never showed up in the single shot.
Hockney put the time back in by breaking the frame apart. Michals put the meaning back in by laying frames side by side. Different tools, the same refusal: that one click of the shutter, however perfect, was never going to be the whole of it.
If this is the kind of thinking you've been hungry for, you may also enjoy FYV — Find Your Voice — a small and friendly community of photographers pushing away at boundaries and leaving photographic dogma behind. If you have ever wondered how you might use your camera as a paintbrush to extend your creative thinking come and take a look.
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