Unreal Nature: Photorealistic Digital Art

May 15, 2008

This Kingdom of One

Filed under: Uncategorized — unrealnature @ 7:33 am

There’s a good, relaxed interview   (”conversation”) with/between John Updike and NEH chairman Bruce Cole talking about art criticism – in the latest issue of Humanities Magazine.  Two widely separated extracts:

[Updike] “We’re drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do, and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort. We don’t really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills. Sargent misses getting top marks because he made it look easy.”

====================

COLE: It must be nice to know that it will get published too.
UPDIKE: You know, it makes it real. One trouble with writing poetry or fiction is that you can be kidding yourself. Or the air can be leaking out of your balloon and you don’t know it. There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving . . .
COLE: . . . and doing criticism and . . .
UPDIKE: writing novels fun, interesting. You’re one level out, though, when you’re writing fiction. I called one of my collections Hugging the Shore.  When you’re writing out of your head—imaginary stuff—you are alone out there, but you’re also the only person in charge. In this kingdom of one, you’re the boss. And the slave, too. You are the workforce.

===================

I am very familiar with that “kingdom of one”. Link to the full conversation is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Frogging

Filed under: Uncategorized — unrealnature @ 7:24 am

Munchkin, yesterday, looking for frogs.

 

When/if I were a little kid, I would have joined her. Being grown-up is so boring…

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

The Observational Self

Filed under: Uncategorized — unrealnature @ 7:19 am

[The following is about print journalism, but I think it applies even more so to photojournalism and documentary photography. ]

The following is taken from an article, Liebling’s War   by Francis-Noël Thomas in Humanities Magazine  which is put out by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The article is about journalist A. J. Liebling.

“One of the things that must be missing from historical narrative is the observational self, because there is no place within historical narrative for the observational self to stand. There is no place for Keegan* [see below ],  for example, to be as an observer—he has, in effect, exchanged his observational self for the persona of historian. As the narrative and analytical intelligence of his book, he is in no one place, and the events he is presenting with such exemplary historiographic competence and such rhetorical élan are not events that happened to him in the course of his lived experience; reading the documents and making the historiographic and rhetorical decisions that turned them into a coherent narrative are part of his lived experience, but that is a different matter. As a historian, he stands in hundreds of different places and from each of them he sees things in sharp focus. It is a convention of this kind of writing that his personality, his opinions, his beliefs, his personal life are left behind when he assumes his professional role.

“Liebling’s art is different. It acknowledges both the limitations and the personal baggage that are inevitable constituencies of observation. He cannot choose where he is even though he tries to place himself somewhere he thinks will offer a good view of important events. The role of reporter, unlike the role of historian, does not free him from whatever he brings with him as an individual living through events. He is constrained to bring with him an observational self that will inevitably affect what he sees and one that will change under the pressure of events. From a distance of twenty years he says he cannot even speak of “the war,” because what he experienced seems more like a series of different wars. The Second World War, even the war in the west, as a composite of innumerable separate events, directly experienced by no one person, is an artifact of the historical imagination. He does not want his experience folded into such an artifact because it will lose its aspect of lived experience.”

“The writer’s tacit claim is, “This is what you could have experienced had you been there; I know because it is what I experienced when I was there.” To succeed it must meticulously separate what was seen from what was only inferred, what was experienced at first from what was figured out later. It must also persuade the reader that there is nothing in the account that is the result of exceptional knowledge, exceptional intelligence, or special competence. It depends on convincing the reader that if he were present, he would have been able to experience just what Liebling did. This is, of course, untrue. For it to be true, the reader would have had to be present inside Liebling’s head, and that is why at least the relevant parts of what was going on in his head are themselves treated as things available to the reader in the same sense as the landing craft and the men on it are available to the reader. Treating the observational self as a “thing” fully available to the reader makes Liebling’s account of his experience function as a kind of allegory of experience.”

“… In reading about officially interesting subjects, we sometimes overlook how much the writer’s perception and judgment are what we are following. The strung-together clichés that make up the worst sort of newspaper “coverage” can make any subject trivial because they create separate “significant” stock events, made false by their discontinuity with the nature of ordinary experience. Subject matter does not determine style; a writer’s conception of truth, presentation, scene, cast, and the relationship between thought and language determine style, and style, in this rigorous sense, creates interest. Held in close focus, by a concentrated intelligence, everything is interesting.”

===============

*who is John Keegan?: “There are many excellent historical accounts of the Normandy Invasion; I will refer to just one: a masterpiece of military and political analysis juxtaposed with a compelling narrative of events by the British military historian John Keegan. Six Armies in Normandy was written long after D-day; it is a work of history, not reportage. Its detail—and it is rich in detail—is the result of research; its writing, sentence by sentence, is unobtrusively superb. The author is himself a kind of general making strategic rhetorical decisions and commanding with quiet mastery a seemingly endless assemblage of details, each one of which seems to have arrived just in time and to have found its optimal place without the least struggle. The details of what drew him to the subject or the details of how easy or difficult it was to gain access to the documents he used in writing about it have no place in his presentation of events—nor does his view of the war or of the parties to the war. He is everywhere and his sympathies are everywhere he is. This mobility—and the role of historian—adds an element of invention that gives historical writing its coherence and unity, and necessarily makes it false to the experience available to an individual.”

To read the full (long) article, click here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com

 

May 14, 2008

The Mirror’s Value

Filed under: Uncategorized — unrealnature @ 7:55 am

[In the following quotes, let the 'translator' be the maker of the picture, and the 'reader' be the viewer of the picture. You looking at my photographs, or I looking at yours -- from my personal culture to yours or vice versa. ]

“This can be understood as an occasion for mutual reflection   between different cultures, where the mirror’s value is not just in the image of clarity but in the clouding that is a sign of life. Mutual reflection here should be distinguished from mutual understanding, especially if the latter involves a direct “face-to-face” dialogue between the different. In mutual reflection the relationship is more indirect – symbolized by a relationship through the father tongue, by written words. In observing the way the other confronts his own culture and language, one is turned back upon her own culture and language, as a stranger. The idea of mutual reflection suggests that “mutual understanding” can be blocked not only by difference in an inter-cultural dimension, but also by blindness to the difference in an intra-cultural dimension — the reader’s and the translator’s inability to confront their own native language and culture, and sometimes perhaps, their naïve trust in understanding the familiar.”

“… mutual reflection (with its emphasis on the written word) offers us a standpoint from which to gain critical awareness of a danger that besets the language of mutual understanding: the danger of the unconscious assimilation of the different into the same, the possibility of blindness to the foreign in the near, the residual or the excess in experience beyond the immediate and the visible. This might be thought of as a danger entailed by our trust in immediacy and directness, as if this were the underside of our fear of not being able to get closer to the other.”

“… awakens us to an illusion of the knowability of the immediate and invites us to keep discovering and rediscovering the strange and the foreign within the same, to release from within ourselves the voice of the different that eternally escapes our full grasp.”

” …  she plays the role of a prophet on the edge of her own culture and langue, in her profession  of philosophy  [or photography ...] .  This requires that she work in the interstices of a culture, without settling down in any fixed space. She plays translator by converting the mother tongue into, as it were, a “foreign” father tongue, by seeking the indirectness and separation that is the means of a common still to be achieved. In the very way she is engaged with her own culture and language, she offers a mirror to the eye of an outsider (both native and foreign) so that the latter can also be engaged in the criticism of his own culture, on his part.”

All of the above quotes taken completely out of context, with meaning therefore bent to my own ends … from an essay, Philosophy as Translation: American philosphy, perfectionism and cross-cultural understanding

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

May 13, 2008

Leica CL

Filed under: Uncategorized — unrealnature @ 9:27 am

I just found this old Leica CL (shown above) in one of my cupboards. It’s itty bitty, teeny tiny and supposedly makes a nice pocket camera (I’m not a Leica person, so I don’t know diddly about this thing). I haven’t used it in at least fifteen years. It needs a good home. If you want it, along with the 90mm lens shown, and your shipping address is in the United States, email me at “julie (at) unrealnature (dot) com”. I will sell camera and the two lenses for $30 US (that includes shipping by USPS Priority Mail). Sold “As Is”, so buy at your own risk.

The shutter seems to work okay. I have no idea if the meter works as I have no battery for it. It’s dirty on the outside, but reasonably clean inside. Learn about the camera here:

http://www.cameraquest.com/leicacl.htm

http://www.photoethnography.com/ClassicCameras/LeicaCL.html

http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?forumid=131

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

 

Taking Pictures With Your Feet

Filed under: Uncategorized — unrealnature @ 7:32 am

The best self-portraits I did were made with my feet. Literally. This was back in the old days of 35mm film cameras. I have a long air-tube cable release with a bulb at the end. You connect the screw-in thingy on one end to the shutter release and then press the bulb on the other end to take the picture. The connecting tube is long (I think it’s twenty-five feet). See illustration below — with the tube wound up on its storage reel.

The reason this is better than the camera’s self-timer is that you can choose your time rather than sitting, paralyzed as the camera counts down to zero. And you can use your feet (or knee or elbow …) to press on the release bulb. You can — almost — catch yourself unawares thus making unposed self-portraits. Using my hands to press the bulb seems to make me more self-conscious than using my feet.

Here’s what I did: I set up the camera on a tripod in the bathroom, prefocused on where my head would be when sitting on a chair that was in a fixed spot. I had the cable release bulb where my foot would be. Then, every morning for about two weeks, the very first thing when I got up in the morning, before doing anything else, and before my brain was fully awake, I would sit on the chair and step on the release bulb.

I don’t know about you, but I look awesomely stupid when I wake up. The tornado-ed hair, the corpse-like skin color, the dazed eyes… the pictures were fantastic. Which is why I’m not going to show them to you.

I will show you another example of where I used the air-tube cable release — to demonstrate one of its drawbacks. At the time when I was using it, there was no auto-focus (film, black and white … those were the days. NOT.)  So if I, or whatever was being photographed wasn’t where it was supposed to be, it was out of focus.

Below you can see what happened when I was photographing a little copperhead on my couch. (I did this to scare all my snake-phobic friends.) In the upper picture, I am tickling the snake to get him to coil up.

In the second picture, you can see that he’s coiled, but the the near part of his body is out of focus because he moved (duh!). The point of the pictures was to show me “on the couch with the snake” thus the need for the cable release. Time-release doesn’t work well at all in this situation; you have to keep getting up and resetting it, and it goes off at the wrong instant.

I haven’t used the air-tube cable release in years. I don’t even know how one would do this with a digital camera since there is no screw-in hole on the shutter release button. Presumably, there is some wireless remote doo-dad that costs a few hundred dollars. Too much to spend on something that I will only use once or twice for fun.

The air-tube was cheap.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

May 12, 2008

Mythologies

Filed under: Uncategorized — unrealnature @ 12:27 pm

“What Barthes is suggesting is that the public need not only look closely and be aware of what the mythological perceptions of objects contained in images are, but that it should also be aware that no image exists independently of an author and that no author acts independently of an ideology.”
– from Roland Barthes and Mythologies: The Science of Semotics and Hidden Meanings  by Tiimothy Sexton

“We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature. We now understand why, in the eyes of the myth consumer, the intention, the adhomination of the concept can remain manifest without however appearing to have an interest in the matter: what causes mythical speech to be uttered is perfectly explicit, but it is immediately frozen into something natural; it is not read as a motive, but as a reason…”

“… Just as the cuttlefish squirts its ink in order to protect itself, it cannot rest until it has obscured the ceaseless making of the world, fixated this world into an object which can be for ever possessed, catalogued its riches, embalmed it, and injected into reality some purifying essence which will stop its transformation, its flight towards other forms of existence. And these riches, thus fixated and frozen, will at last become computable: bourgeois morality will essentially be a weighing operation, the essences will be placed in scales of which bourgeois man will remain the motionless beam. For the very end of myths is to immobilize the world: they must suggest and mimic a universal order which has fixated once and for all the hierarchy of possessions. Thus, every day and everywhere, man is stopped by myths, referred by them to this motionless prototype which lives in his place, stifles him in the manner of a huge internal parasite and assigns to his activity the narrow limits within which he is allowed to suffer without upsetting the world: bourgeois pseudo-physics is in the fullest sense a prohibition for man against inventing himself. Myths are nothing but this ceaseless, untiring solicitation, this insidious and inflexible demand that all men recognize themselves in this image, eternal yet bearing a date, which was built of them one day as if for all time. For the Nature, in which they are locked up under the pretext of being eternalized, is nothing but an Usage. And it is this Usage, however lofty, that they must take in hand and transform.”
– taken from this full text of Mythologies   by Roland Barthes

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Silence Will Do Just As Well

Filed under: Uncategorized — unrealnature @ 7:27 am

“What particular questions you ask; where you need to keep asking questions; what is in the center of attention, what on the periphery, and what in the darkness outside; in what circumstances and to what exact extent clarity and explicitness are good things, and in what circumstances mere approximation — silence — will do just as well; none of any of this was written in stone, inherently in the human breast, in the starry heavens…”

“Was philosophy a response to questions, which, although they arose contingently and were constantly changing, were questions to which we needed a response (which philosophy, or even, “only philosophy” could give)? Or was it a free aesthetic activity?”
[quotes taken out of context from an article, Richard Rorty at Princeton: Personal Recollections by Raymond Geuss ]

Is it really necessary or even useful to talk about the philosophy of photography? Consider this analogy.

I live on a mountainous, undeveloped piece of land behind which are two thousand acres of total wilderness (owned sequentially by various non-local timber companies). When I moved here, about eighteen years ago, that two thousand acres was totally unknown to me. There are a few old logging roads, but most of it has neither roads nor trails of any kind. I could have stayed in my house, in my garden, close to home and have never explored that wild unknown. Or, I could, bit by bit, learn my way around it. That’s what I did. Took me about a year to feel fully confident that I know my way to and from any point in the two thousand acres, and I’m still learning the details of what’s in there (and will surely never learn it all).

Point being, that doing it that way — sort of groping around in the dark until I, bit by bit, built up the mental map needed to find my way around — should be a last resort (there was and is nobody else living who knows the land beyond the logging roads). If there are people who know the way, if there are maps, or advice, or any kind of existing prior or on-going knowledge of where you want to go, then it’s surely worth asking instead of reinventing the wheel all by yourself.

To answer this post’s leading questions, no, you don’t need  to verbalize your philosophy of photography — you can probably find your way by yourself. But it’s quicker, more efficient, richer, and possibly beyond what you will do by yourself — to interact in philosophical discussions about what, where, why you are wanting to go if you decide to strke out into terrain that is unknown to you.

To continue my analogy, for example, now that I have the knowledge, I could tell other people what I have learned about the land behind me. The highlights, the dangers, the ways in and out; that if you go up High Top mountain when there is a low, well-defined cloud cover, you can stand with your feet in the daylight and your head in the racing clouds; that it’s not a good idea to cut the chain holding the top of a poacher’s forty foot tree-stand attached to the downhill side of a tree on a nearly vertical mountain – while sitting in said tree-stand; that snakes are rare and bears are common; that both mother deer and mother turkeys will bluff-charge you when they have newborns nearby; that whether you like being completely alone when a long way from any kind of civilization  depends on your nature. That exploring the unknown is so much better than sittiing safely at home…

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

May 11, 2008

Jungleland

Filed under: Uncategorized — unrealnature @ 10:54 am

Munchkin, yesterday. Looking for Tarzan.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Your Inner Valence

Filed under: Uncategorized — unrealnature @ 7:28 am

“The various tremors of lived experience — whether they come in the form of an epiphany at an outlet mall or an epic tragedy like the attack on the World Trade Center — shock us into attention, but what we wake to in those moments is a reality that’s always there.”

The above quote from a review in the New York Sun — Poetry and Our Age: Adam Kirsch’s Invasions  (a good article, though this post is not about it), made me stop and think. If there is an unnoticed reality “that’s always there”, then in what reality was I before I noticed the unnoticed one?

I agree that there are many things that I do not know that nevertheless exist. I’m not questioning the existence of reality separate from myself. I am considering how many  of them there are — and how one gets from one to the other.

Think of yourself as an electron in a system of quantum consciouness. Normally, you inhabit the lowest orbital shell of the atom in which you exist. But it is possible for you to become excited and pop to a higher, more energetic shell or orbit. A different reality. In these higher states, you become like a valence electron:

“Valence electrons are important in determining how an element reacts chemically with other elements: The fewer valence electrons an atom holds, the less stable it becomes and the more likely it is to react.The reverse is also true, the more full/complete the valence shell is with valence electrons, the more inert an atom is and the less likely it is to chemically react with other chemical elements or with chemical elements of its own type. This is because it takes more transfer of energy (photons) to lose or gain an electron from or into a shell when that shell is more complete/full.” — from Wikipedia

Note that to get from a lower shell to a higher valence shell — that excited state in which you can make fantastic photographs — you have to input energy. This requires some doing on your part. See, for example, The Online Photographer’s post, Oil Shots,  in which he states: “I feel a certain resistance to raising the camera to my eye and taking that first shot.” Be sure to read the many concurring comments to his blog post on the difficulty of elevating the state of ones inner valence.

Don’t forget that with ones inner valence,   as with all things to do with quantum physics, the move from one state to another is not continuous: you are either in one or in the other. There is no in-between. You are either in your every-day ho-hum reality or in your heightened photo-ninja state of fully oiled-ness.

Now, I must pop back to a lower shell — I have chores to do. Stand back for photon release as I become un-oiled.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com

 

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