click! Photography Changes Everything

Robert Adams, photographer, writes about some of the best photographs can be ambiguous yet uplifting, at once.

Some of the best photographs are both discouraging and encouraging at once. Nicholas Nixon’s picture of a calf is of that mixed sort, a cautiously astringent expression of hope.

Like all photographers, Nixon speaks to us in part by what he declines to tell us. In this case the title—“West Springfield, Massachusetts, 1978”—forces us to think. Are we visiting a family farm? Possibly, but it seems more likely that we are at a county fair, and with that realization we are brought to remember that many large animals there have at best only a few months to live.

The photographer also instructively keeps from us the face of the person extending her or his arm. We assume the individual is caring—the touch is so light that the calf does not open its eyes—but the arm is so perfect that it seems almost abstract, almost an ideal. Shouldn’t the hand be stroking the animal a little, rather than just touching it? Perhaps it is, although the angle of contact does not quite suggest that. In any case what we want is to believe that an actual person, one like you and me, is reaching out impulsively in wonder and with affection. Nixon seems reluctant, however, by not letting us see the expression on the individual’s face, fully to confirm the person’s humane motives.

If the photographer denies us these clarifications, what does he make plain? To our surprise, he shows us the humanity of the calf’s face—the eyelashes, for example, and the suggestion even of a smile. And he makes it encouragingly clear that someone has been attentive, providing a clean, warm bed of straw. And, despite the almost hieratic formality of the arm, there is its beauty.

Beauty implied a promise. I have puzzled over the arm for thirty years that I have known the picture, and, because no significant artist works unacquainted with the past, I cannot rid myself of the feeling that the picture makes reference to the best known picture of Creation, the one in the Sistine Chapel showing the hand of God touching the hand of Adam and thus bringing us all to life by completing a kind of current. Here the enlivening current unites the created with the created.

Is there hope? We see from Nixon’s picture that this particular calf was not tormented by being confined tightly in a crate in order to turn it into veal. We even see evidence of humane care and of the possibility of human tenderness. And we know that the photographer saw these things too and wished to share them with us.

He and we would be naïve to claim that the view is of a new world, but perhaps not foolish to see it as a new beginning.