Balancing act between instinct and reason

Babette Mangolte (New York) 

Performance documentation and how to shoot it is what this paper is about. The methodology described here produced photographs that now are considered “historical photographs” and it is “after the act” that those photographs can be read as “organizing volumes on a flat surface”. In the heat of the moment I certainly didn't feel like reason had anything to do with shooting photographs. I just captured everything as fast as I could. The examination of a practice “after the act”, gives the false impression that above all, shooting photographs is about control. For me it was, and still is, exactly the contrary. Photographing is about relinquishing control. You submit yourself to whims, random thoughts, and haphazardness. Essentially the photographer should be in a reactive mode, far from reasoning. Intuition, whatever way you define it, is a must. Retroactively I am conscious of a slippage between the meaning associated with a body of photographs and the practice that preceded the accumulation of that corpus and the “balancing act between instinct and reason” applies to that slippage.

I came to performance photography because of the need to keep trace of what I was seeing and to record my amazement as a spectator. There was an urgency I felt when, for the first time, I saw Richard Foreman’s play Total Recall in December 1970. What I saw was extraordinary but only four other people were there to see it. Therefore recording it was an absolute necessity. Somebody had to preserve for posterity some traces of the extraordinary originality of the third production of Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theatre.