On Prisoners and Dilemmas

It’s always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don’t make changes, don’t risk disapproval, don’t upset your syndics. It’s always easiest to let yourself be governed. There’s a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities. Those who build walls are their own prisoners.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a famous thought experiment in the field of game theory. It involves two suspects being interrogated separately, each having to decide whether to maintain their innocence and face a light sentence for a minor crime, or to implicate their partner in a more serious crime in exchange for being set free. If both refuse to confess, both will be convicted of the lesser crime and serve a light sentence. If both turn on each other, both will receive the harsher sentence for the more serious crime. If only one turns on the other, the snitch gets to walk away free while the other will receive a much harsher penalty for failing to cooperate. The dilemma is structured such that the best strategy (assuming each suspect considers their own freedom more important than their partner’s friendship), is to snitch immediately.

Some situations in art may be thought of in terms of The Prisoner’s Dilemma in the sense that they involve opportunities for one artist (or group of artists) to advance their own interests even if it means sacrificing others’ interests. This is arguably more so the case in photography than in other media. For example, it is common in photography for photographers to advance their own interests by taking credit for works copied from others (denying the original artist recognition and exclusivity).

The reason this is more common in photography than in other media is not because plagiarism is less unethical in photography, but because it’s easier to get away with. Copyright laws don’t protect original photographic creators to the same degree as original creators in other media. This is due to the common misconception that photographers only ever “take” pictures of public views available to anyone and don’t add anything original of their own creative minds to their work, so there is nothing for which they can legitimately claim original authorship beyond operating their cameras. While this is undoubtedly the case in many, perhaps most, situations, it is certainly not the case in all situations. Alas, copyright laws generally make no distinction between creative photographs and documentary/representational photographs. The result is that mediocre artists may gain accolades and recognition for the (comparatively easy to accomplish) aesthetic quality of their work, even if their work is largely or entirely copied from others, thus earning the entire photographic medium the unfortunate reputation of being, as Gore Vidal put it, “the ‘art form’ of the untalented.”

Also in the vein of favoring one’s own interests at the expense of another, is the shamefully common (in some photographic quarters) practice of denouncing the works of creative photographers as not being “real” photography if these photographers dare to venture beyond certain contrived, outmoded—and in many cases irrelevant—boundaries of purism, having the effect of confining and denying creative photographic artists the same freedoms that artists in other media have been taking for granted for more than a century, including some freedoms and that are considered by scholars as the most meritorious qualities in art: freedoms founded in skilled manipulations of materials toward an artist’s own unique, creative, expressive sensibilities, in accordance with their own subjective intents and personal philosophies. For example, among numerous other writings on this topic in recent decades, I’ll mention Clive Bell’s seminal book, Art, published in 1914, in which Bell declares plainly, “any system of aesthetics which pretends to be based on some objective truth is so palpably ridiculous as not to be worth discussing.”

While photography’s stature as a medium eminently capable of objective “as-seen” representation is not in doubt, if photography is to also claim equal standing as a medium for art alongside painting or other methods of visual production, the conclusion must be (with apology for bluntness) this: photographic artists need to grow up. However proud we may be of the progress made in photographic art in recent decades, when considered within the greater field of all arts, there is no denying we have several generations worth of thinking in and about art to catch up to.

Of course, Berenice Abbott’s statement that “Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium” holds true, too. No doubt, photography possesses many distinctive features making it unique among visual media. While the capacity to reproduce detailed, realistic depictions is certainly one, and perhaps the most obvious, of these features, it is not the only one, and certainly not a mandatory one for any work—photographic or other—to qualify as art. Also, we can’t keep pretending that our photographic tools today restrict us to realism. Our tools today in fact may well exceed in their flexibility and range of expressive capacities the toolsets of perhaps any other visual medium.

That photographs should be distinguishable from other artforms is not in doubt, but also not in doubt is the fact that “art,” as the term is defined today, refers specifically to things created, not to things merely captured or recorded with no original contribution of an artist’s own mind. In fact, this was already the case as far back as the 19^th century, as expressed by Henry Peach Robinson: “A method that will not admit of the modifications of the artist cannot be an art, and therefore is photography in a perilous state if we cannot prove that it is endowed with possibilities of untruth.”

Reconciling the capacities and traditions of the photographic medium with greater notions of Art (with a capital A) may be thought of as a different kind of prisoner’s dilemma. “Tradition,” wrote Somerset Maugham, “is a guide and not a jailer.” I find it profoundly sad to think about how far photography, relative to other media, has been held back as an artform by those who staunchly fail to acknowledge this simple maxim; those who take comfort in the sheltered confines of former methods and canons, walled off from the goings-on in greater world of art, in self-imposed creative confinement; those who, like the captives in Plato’s Cave, fear venturing out into the unknown, brighter, mysterious, and dangerous world outside lest they may find it more alluring than the familiar, predictable world of the cave, or worse yet: find that the reality of the world outside the cave may be at odds with long-held beliefs, traditions, or shared values that bind the small cave community together, but that in the grander scheme may come to seem obsolete or irrational to those who dare to venture beyond the cave walls.

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The concept of imprisonment—being in some ways confined and/or denied certain freedoms to choose how to use one’s time—is often used metaphorically in other contexts, as well. For example, people who willingly give up the freedom of leisure and time for personal pursuits by becoming beholden to demanding, high-paying jobs, are sometimes described as wearing “golden handcuffs.” On the opposite end, people who have no choice but to depend on low-paying jobs to meet their basic needs are sometimes described as “wage slaves.”

I have often found it odd when photographers who, for whatever reason, may only practice their work on short breaks from other occupations expect to achieve the same degree of creative accomplishment as people who (often at risk of financial hardship or by giving up other activities or experiences) choose to dedicate much more time and effort to their work. In what other walk of life is this considered a reasonable expectation?

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Using the metaphor of confinement, Oliver Sacks described people who spend too much time on social media as being “trapped in this virtual world . . . never alone, never able to concentrate and appreciate in their own way, silently.” These people, he lamented, “have given up, to a great extent, the amenities and achievements of civilization: solitude and leisure, the sanction to be oneself, truly absorbed, whether in contemplating a work of art, a scientific theory, a sunset, or the face of one’s beloved.” Likewise, the great environmentalist David Brower described a world in which there is no wilderness—no places where, as he put it, “the flow of wildness is essentially uninterrupted by technology.” “Without wilderness,” he wrote, “the world is a cage.”

I see no reason to practice my photography if I can’t feel myself free from the trap of virtual worlds, if I can’t be absorbed in my work, in the wildness outside the cage of regulated and controlled environments. I am a nature photographer because I cherish my solitary experiences in nature. It seems pointless to me to have nature photographs but to never experience nature. That seems to me like becoming a chef and taking no pleasure in cooking, only in serving the finished meals hoping they will satisfy others.

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A sinister aspect of imprisonment often left unmentioned is that, in some situations, forced confinement may become seductive if one becomes used to and dependent on it to such a degree that, if freed, one may become afflicted with “post-incarceration syndrome”—a term coined by Terence Gorski to describe the psychological difficulties some long-time prisoners experience when having to adjust to a world in which they must make independent choices in situations where there may be no clear “right” or “wrong” way, and face the risk of failing. Incarceration, at least in most prisons in industrialized countries today, while no doubt profoundly unpleasant and restrictive, also comes with predictable routines, with having few and unambiguous opportunities to make independent choices, with guaranteed housing, food, community, and healthcare. Being released from such environments means also facing the challenge of having to provide these for one’s self.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” While no prisoners held in cells behind barbed wire, under the supervision of armed guards, are likely to falsely believe they are free, artists often do fall into this mistaken belief. In what ways is an ostensibly free artist imprisoned? Henri Matisse offered some possible answers. He said, “An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, a prisoner of manner, a prisoner of reputation, or a prisoner of success.”

How is one a prisoner of self or success? In the same manner that a highly paid employee may become fettered by “golden handcuffs”: by becoming accustomed to and comfortable with the idea that one’s welfare is largely or entirely dependent on and controlled by other people. Artists may become prisoners of their audience’s expectations. They may come to associate their own self-worth with public opinion, adoration, or social status within a community and thus (perhaps unwittingly) become motivated to give up certain creative freedoms, to keep creating the same kinds of art they are known and liked for, in the same predictable and expected styles, perhaps actively promoting socially-accepted values and rhetoric without considering them too critically, abiding by established traditions to maintain their community standing, fame, or income. Perhaps without realizing it, such artist may become the kind of persons Upton Sinclair referred to when he wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

I’d like to believe I have never been such a person. When life brought me to points where, despite ostensible success and comfort, I felt unfulfilled or at odds with the prevailing culture, I knew it was time to move on, to try something else, sometimes even to recant former beliefs upon realizing they are contradicted or made less certain by newly acquired wisdom. Alas, I find myself now in such a position. I am no longer satisfied doing “more of the same,” and much less so with the overwhelming trend of turning photography into a community activity, driven by the whims and opinions of “influencers” whose primary qualification for leadership is popularity.

While I don’t doubt that popularity may be correlated to a degree with depth and creative skill, the correlation is far from perfect, and popularity is ultimately about common denominators. Art, at least the kind of art that interests me most, is about individualism and original creation. Thus, at least in some important ways, the motivations for artmaking and popularity are incompatible, or even antithetical.

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These thoughts have been on my mind on my long drive back from my penultimate scheduled photography workshop that ended a couple of days ago. With only one more workshop remaining on my calendar, the voices that a few years ago began to subtly gnaw away at my satisfaction with photography as I have practiced it for the greater part of three decades, are now speaking more loudly and clearly. It’s time for something new. I don’t know, and don’t want to know, what that will be, and if I did it would not be nearly as exciting. Or as intimidating.

Rumi asked, poignantly and not at all naively,

Why do you stay in prison

when the door is so wide open?

With much trepidation, it is obvious to me that there is only one honest answer I have to this question, and this answer is not “because it’s safer” or “because it’s what I know.” I anticipate great changes in my life and work in the coming months and years. I will share here whatever worthy insights I may find as I continue to journey. I intend and hope to continue earning your interest and support.

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