hokey_photo.jpg

when you flinch you're telling the truth

I keep thinking about something Sally Mann said the other night. She was talking about how most of her photos are now untitled, but once you scan an image to a computer it has to have some kind of name, especially if you’re sending it to another artist or a gallery. And sometimes you’re still in dialogue or tension with the art, you know maybe it’s okay, but it’s not great, but here you are.

“So you end up emailing something that’s got a file name like ‘hokey_photo,’ or ‘corny_image,’” she lamented.

Magnolia liliflora, Jackson, Mississippi, Polaroid SX-70 (2023)

The audience for the converstation between her and Maude Schuyler Clay at the Mississippi Museum of Art cracked up, and I did too, although I was desperate to know more—like, what exactly does she consider hokey!! But then when I was in my backyard the other day trying to make snaps of the Japanese magnolia I got it.

It was blooming in February, which was weeks too early, and even though pink blossoms were exploding all over the branches, there wasn’t a hint of green. This winterspring we’ve had in Mississippi has triggered explosions of azaleas and camellias and roses, which are bound to end in an avalanche of soft brown petals. I wanted to preserve the way the tree looked while I could, but later you look at the photos and still have to grapple with this is just a picture of a flower.

The backyard tree, the same pretty day

If you had told me twenty years ago, when I first picked up a Polaroid camera to make art, that I would be taking pictures of flowers, I would have ran away. Over the years I began to evolve a mission statement that was about trying to preserve the ephemeral moments of the South through the volatile slips of plastic and paper that whirred out of these aging cameras.

That’s very much at the forefront of what I’m trying to do some days—trying—but sometimes I also just want to make a pretty picture. Yesterday there was a golden glow spread across my neighborhood, and I thought to myself, oh, if I could only bottle this.

Jill’s room, Rowan Oak, Oxford, Mississippi, Polaroid SX-70 (2017)

When you’re making a photo, there is intent behind it. (Sidebar, in 2023, let’s celebrate artistic creation, making anything at all in the winter, any attempt at trying to make and create. So you won the minute you lifted the camera to your cheek or put pencil to pad.) And I believe that intent can be preserved or transmitted—even the desire or the hope present in that moment—after all, isn’t that what beauty is? Only the hopes and desires of a moment in time preserved by brush or chisel on marble or a splash of light onto waiting paper.

I think though sometimes we’re a little scared to seek out that beauty, or acknowledge it even. There’s a vulnerability in saying look at that, look at how gorgeous the light is hitting the tops of those pines. If you’re taking a tour of some historic home it’s weird to stop looking at the objects and paintings and stand, open-mouthed, looking at the way the setting sun dapples the floorboards. If you identify this moment, or try to preserve it, you then not only set yourself apart from everyone else who may just be enjoying a nice day, you might also transform the moment by taking yourself out of time to preserve it.

Home of Francis & Jen Ervin, Charleston, South Carolina, Polaroid SX-70 (2018)

Which is where it helps to have a little inner steel and some good friends. If you’re out making art with some other folks, all that weirdness of setting yourself apart from the world disappears. Suddenly someone else is there with you, excited to see the shadow in the dirt, the angle of the branch, the flicker of neon. If you’re by yourself just pretend you’re Capa on assignment and you’re braving bullets.

Portrait of a horseshoe, Jackson, SX-70 (2017)

Maybe the ultimate key for me is to believe in what I’m doing. If I’m genuinely trying, trying to preserve a moment of time in a space and place close to me, trying to find the beauty a second as time speeds by, it feels right. Even when that betrays a sentimentality and a vulnerability I’m 100% not comfortable sharing with other people. Perhaps risking that vulnerability—sharing what you saw and felt—is also a part of making art.

Thus concludes IN DEFENSE OF MAKING HOKEY JPGS: THE EMOTION IS THE POINT, part 1 of 1,270. Now go see something pretty today and point it out to someone else (or at least throw it in your IG stories, no caption needed).

“HOKEY_FOTO.JPG” is this week’s installment of GORJUS, a newsletter devoted to art and life in the South on instant film. If you like it, consider sending it to a pal. Just like anything, some weeks are better than others. I’m gorjusjxn on Instagram, and you can see more Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.