Umbrellas, Sewing Machines and Mirthless Frog Death

Charles Traub, Taradiddle, Damiani, 2018

 Umbrellas, Sewing Machines and Mirthless Frog Death.

An essay written for Charles Traub’s book Taradiddle, 2018.

Pick one of the photographs from this book. Any one. The one you like the most. Describe it. Put into words what you see, and what you think of what you see.  The whole. The parts. The relations between the parts.  The framing, the timing, the vantage point, the subject matter. The way the photographer’s camera records, and transforms what it records, observing and shaping. The facts, the metaphors, the ironies. The sleight of hand and eye. Explain to yourself why you like it the most. If you can.

These are Charles Traub’s taradiddles – plain and complex, straight shooting and evasive, and not altogether easy to describe. I think they are also profound in the way that photography seems uniquely predisposed to the profound: by being naturally and unapologetically light. That is, they are light about photography and light about the observable world.  These images are also funny, and this presents an extra little twist to the challenge of description. Analysing a joke is like dissecting a frog: the frog dies and nobody laughs. As they say. It’s a joke about jokes. It fails to amuse and that is a special source of amusement. A joke at the expense of jokes. This has something to do with humour in photography generally, and with Traub’s version of it in particular, for what amuses here is also bittersweet, startled, warped and woeful. Kindly consolation from a world awry. And at the risk of a little mirthless frog death, let us analyse it a little. These pictures can surely take it.

About photography there is always something a little surgical, a little dismembering. It’s like an operating table. As Charles Traub’s contemporary Stephen Shore once noted, photography is an analytical medium. It studies what it pictures (or pictures what it studies), and this means that humour and analysis may coexist quite happily here, and by extension in the sensibility of the photographer. The set-up, the joke and its dissection come at the photographer, and then come at us, simultaneously. Suspended. Laid out. Laid bare.

There is always something a little surreal about photography too. That is a horribly abused adjective these days, so here’s the source. The surrealists were thrilled and amused by Comte de Lautréamont’s description from 1869 of a young boy being “as beautiful as the chance meeting on an operating table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella.” They thrilled even more at the discovery that photography has such generous and easy access to chance encounter. To the stuff of life that you just cannot make up. The stuff that makes life if not more livable, then at least thrilling and amusing from time to time.

What unites Charles Traub’s pictures here? They are all in one way or another about photography. They may even amount to a commentary upon photography as a phenomenon of daily life. Photography as something we do daily, and photographs as things we encounter daily, often by chance. To this extent at least, these are meta-photographs. And, when Traub is not including photographs within his frames, he’s including frames within his frames, signs within his signs, representations within his representations. A hall of mirrors – monstrous, alluring and endearing.

This kind of self-awareness has a venerable lineage. It goes back all the way to the beginnings of photography. So many of the very earliest camera pictures were treatises on image making, on copying, doubling and reproduction. Indeed, the very earliest was a copy of a drawing. It was soon lost in the attempt to copy it in turn, and all we have to go on is a written account.  As far as we know it wasn’t funny but in its own way it must have been profound.

While the compulsion to make images of images is something of an origin story for photography, it is also an origin story for many photographers.  Making emphatically reflexive images is something young photographers do to announce their intent and separate themselves from common snappers, of from their own temptation snap commonly. In this way photographers underscore their position, amusing and thrilling to their own distanced measure. The first audience for any such photograph is usually the photographer. It’s like practicing a joke in front of the mirror before telling it to friends.

There are other good reasons to include photographs within one’s photographs. Chief among them is that it would be perverse not to. “Photographs are,” as Susan Sontag famously put it, “perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as ‘modern.’” That was in 1973. Since then photography has thickened the modern environment to the point of torpor, and maybe it has become a lot less mysterious in the process. Maybe not.

By 1973, Charles Traub had been serious and funny with a camera for a few years, and photographs had already found their way into some of his photographs. Being essentially restless, he has moved in all manner of directions in the intervening years, but something abides in his images of images.  Perhaps he has now come full circle, accepting that a photographer’s first intuitions about their medium will often remain the bedrock of a life’s picture making.

Getting to grips with a camera is not like learning the violin or the piano. You can pick up most of the technique in a very short space of time. A matter of weeks, or even days. It could hardly be simpler. And while it may take a lifetime to come to terms with what is possible with a camera, and what its implications are, that ease of access leaves a deep impression on most photographers. They know, or at least intuit, that something profound can be done with a camera almost immediately.  That means mature work can be made very early. And in turn this complicates the idea of what it is for a photographer to mature. What work can a photographer make after forty or fifty years that they couldn’t make in their youth?  Aside from self-portraits, it’s a difficult question to answer.  We know what a late, great novel, or symphony, or suite of paintings can be. But such stature seems to elude photography, and when it is consciously reached for, the results are often excruciating.  And so maybe, after decades of photography, what Charles Traub offers in his taradiddles is a renewal of humility.  A good-natured coming to terms with the mere hill of beans.