I am reading a book in which the phrase, "the human predicament" came up, and it struck me as both familiar and strange at the same time - as in, I've read this before, but what does it mean, exactly? Why does being human put us into a predicament?
A little bit of input from an AI bot quickly led me into some dark spaces, but I don't think it needs to be that way. As The Buddha said, "Life is suffering," but of course he said it in an ancient language, and so it may be better translated as, "To experience this human life is to experience dissatisfaction."
And yet, he also encouraged us to recognize that we are perfect as we are: enlightened, compassionate beings, if we can just see past the flak. Which is to say, if we can just stop trying to avoid the suffering.
On to photography.
I saw a YouTube video recently on Sebastiao Salgado, and when his work was criticized for being too beautiful for its subject - and therefore leading to acquiescence rather than action - he replied by pointing out that he was photographing the dignity of his subjects as well as their plights. This seems to me to sum up this notion of the "human predicament" perfectly well - this life inevitably entails suffering, but it need not rob us of our dignity, our grace, our inherent beauty. Salgado captures this time and time again in his work.
All well and good for a master of his art. But what about us as viewers?
Photo by Sebastião Salgado
In any work of art, the viewer is in a predicament. Beyond the initial and sometimes pertinent questions of, "What is it? What is the creator trying to tell me? and "How do I feel about it?" are those that help us understand the very context of our action, as we stand there, seemingly doing nothing.
Far too often, we attribute our experiences entirely to the creator. Questions such as, "What do I bring to this experience?" "How does my position in life, in terms of race, gender, class, age and sexual predilections inform how I see this image?" "Is there something within the image that I want? Is there something I am averse to? Or ignorant of?" all may help us to understand what we bring to the experience.
Having seen perhaps one too many judging events, and having heard the sometimes sincere, sometimes pro-forma apology for the judgment being "just one person's opinion," I've rarely, if ever, heard a judge address any of these question. And while we don't want a therapeutic disclosure from the judge, but rather their professional opinion on the image, I think it presents a misleading model of how we, as individuals, might look at art within the confines and relative safety of our own time, space and minds.
I love Salgado's work, in part because he does so many things I cannot, but also because his work moves me with its beauty and makes me despair at the same time. It's no revelation that there are humans drawn to cruelty and depravity, just as there are those drawn to beauty and compassion; what's startling is to have this existential enigma laid out for us in the image of a single moment.
And one of the resulting predicaments, for me, is the gift Salgado has given me of having to carry the burden of what his images convey throughout my lifetime. They nag at my consciousness like an unresolved childhood dilemma, and similarly I see them differently as I age: from despair as a younger person to admiration as I grew in my photography, to an equanimous acceptance in these 'advancing years.' The circumstances in his images are what they are - I bring my own story to them, as does everyone else. And that story, like everything, changes.
This too is a quality of good art: that you can revisit it many times and see something anew, in part because the person doing the viewing is new, but also because it warrants your engagement. It may shed light on our condition, but it does so not so much by revelation as by instigating, within the viewer, questions about how we see the world around us.