The photographs of Nathan Lyons concerning the power of the preposition

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 2004 by Leroy F. Searle

When I first met Nathan Lyons, I anticipated something midway between a legend and a rumor--entirely appropriate for someone who, in the venerable tradition of wizards, had created a full-fledged graduate program in photography affiliated then with SUNY-Buffalo. This arrangement did not even require him to go to department meetings. As if that were not amazing enough, he moved the program from the George Eastman House to an old woodworking factory, enlisting every new class of graduate students into remodeling (from the walls to the wiring) and turning the Visual Studies Workshop into one of the most remarkable institutions in the contemporary history of American art and culture, whose graduates, faculty, and friends are, without much exaggeration, the Who's Who of American Photography.

But the most enduring impression for me pertains to his photographs. In late 1973, my wife Annie and I went to see a presentation of the images shortly to appear in book-form as Notations in Passing. I can't recall the venue, but I will never forget the experience. Nathan said only enough to indicate that he was using language with an unaccustomed force and intelligence--but mildly annoying, as if all substantives fell away, leaving only the prepositions. He just showed the slides, two by two, with a measured pace and a few syncopated pauses precisely where one needed time. As he proceeded, I had the sense of being surrounded, overwhelmed, invited and provoked by these images, to which Nathan simply deferred, pointing, not even needing to say: See! It was a dazzling experience, but not because these images were breathtakingly beautiful. On the contrary, they were not: they made love to the ordinary, gathered up the commonplace in all its strangeness. In Notations in Passing, the organizing motif of a blank billboard [see above, right] is the "Introduction", enigmatically postulating communication as if by casting about for some message in a bottle, only to find the paper blank or illegible. This metaphor touches on things embedded so deeply in our daily lives that they become invisible. Like so many people, I owe Nathan an unredeemable debt for the experience of being induced through this difficult logic of metaphor to learn how to see.

Nathan Lyons's work is not casual, but designed, meticulous. But what is it up to? In his preface to Riding 1st Class on the Titanic!, Adam Weinburg recalls the Workshop experience of staying up late "into the night ... arguing about the significance and validity of a particular sequence of photographs" (ii), an experience shared by countless others led by Nathan's images and example, as a simple question launches an inquiry that might touch on anything before it winds down. In Plato's Republic, Socrates recommends to his late night interlocutors that they set up their schools to study only those things that he calls "provocatives":

   The experiences that do not provoke thought are
   those that do not, at the same time, issue in a contradictory
   perception. Those that do have the effect that I set
   down as provocatives, when the perception no more
   manifests one thing than its contrary, alike whether its
   impact comes from nearby or afar [The Republic, 523c].

This quality of contradictory perception runs through Notations in Passing and continues, more richly, in Riding 1st Class on the Titanic!. From the start, however, Lyons gives us not just the oddly withheld promise of a message but a thunderous excess of signification, marks made upon marks, as provocative as anything in Plato. Take the two images above, not originally presented side by side in Notations in Passing in which the messages are multiple, disturbing, saturated with latent connections that sketch out an enormous field of meaning. Strategic visual juxtaposition is an invitation to judgment. The launching of sequence as in Riding 1st Class on the Titanic! positions before us the incipient forces of a culture struggling to decide what it is, looking to a toxic future and a caricature of the past, a culture where judgment takes form only by way of explication, to whatever level of detail one has the patience to endure. Make no mistake: no one ever 'gets it' the first time through.

In her astute review of Riding 1st Class on the Titanic! in The New York Times (May 12, 2000) Vicki Goldberg begins by remarking Nathan's profound influence, exercised, as she says, "without much fame or any celebrity." While that depends not a little on who you talk to, at stake is the influence of imaginative patience, not trying to create an explosion so as to get famous, but to foster thought and to follow where visual intelligence leads. Thus, Riding First Class continues Notations in Passing, as both draw upon sources in Lyons's earlier concerns with the power of visual thinking. By extension, his work belongs to a larger history with innumerable players, engaged in the ongoing enterprise of learning to think photographically. As an injunction, "Think photographically!"--surely that must be written on some billboard--hinges on a re-cognition with a slower rhythm that photography is not just a medium of representation, in the point-and-shoot modality which made George Eastman's fortune. any more than it is merely a tool to announce (or denounce) propaganda or get up a political parade. More centrally, it is a medium for the mind and spirit, through which the subject/operator feels and thinks in a focused, precise way that is ordinarily lost to us in the sheer speed and fluidity of events.