Kombolói

My Nowhere composites (and several others such as the Mind Game, and the Blackwater series) are ’slow’ pictures. They work best of you look at them when you’re not in a hurry and don’t have anything particular on your mind. Sort of like worry beads, the Greek word for which is Kombolói.

There is a dynamic between the motion of the shapes in the frame and, at the same time, the pattern recognition of the repeated objects. For example, in the one shown here, I used each leaf three times. It takes a while for that to be apparent, so I expect a viewer will first find some mild interest in the swirling layout of the leaves, before noticing the connection between the treble repeats.

Shown below with the triplets marked.

These compositional motion/pattern plays shouldn’t preclude additional impact from the nature of the materials (at least it doesn’t for me; I love the shape, texture and color of leaves and rocks).

-Julie

Heidegger: Earth vs World

There is an interesting essay at Poetry Magazine called “The Taste of Silence” by Adam Kirsch. Below are a few quotes. If you like them, hop over to the full essay (linked above) which I think you’ll like. When reading it, try substituting “photographer” for “poet”. (Note that the best parts of the full essay are after about the first four paragraphs. He starts with a (necessary) explanation/apology for Heidegger’s association with the Nazis.)

[begin quotes from the article]

Art confronts us with “the earth”—the sensuous reality of the non-human, which we tend to forget or ignore when we are engaged in practical tasks. At the same time, art sets the earth into “the world”—the historical human context in which we work, suffer, and hope.

If the poet is primarily concerned with earth—with displaying particular being and concrete reality—he will tend to conceive of poetry as a passive art, concerned with perception and preservation.

This poetry [of the earth] … prefers to imagine the artist not as a creator, but as a witness. It has a strong sense of ethical obligation, holding that the poet must serve as a bearer of memories and perceptions that history would otherwise sweep away. Whenever a poet is concerned with giving things their proper names, or with remembering what everyone else forgets, or with seeing nature so intently that it seems to yield up secrets, he or she is practicing this sort of Heideggerian poetry.

If, on the other hand, the poet is more concerned with world—with the historical, mythic, and spiritual context that the poem creates or invokes—he will tend to see poetry as an active art, and in some sense even a domineering one. The poet of world doesn’t just want to preserve an experience with the reader; he wants to interpret experience for the reader. He goes beyond names to commandments.

What makes the poetry of earth so challenging to write is that poets are instinctive world-builders. The artistic imagination is instinctively imperial, seizing on things seen and turning them into occasions for symbol and metaphor. (Think of all the poems that have been written to wrest the bird’s song away from the bird and turn it into a symbol of transcendence, freedom, or passion.)

The poetry of earth succeeds only when it manages to make the earth itself strange to us, so that we can perceive it in its aloof beauty. When the poet allows the earth to remain familiar, however, his praise of it becomes mere praise for the familiar—for everything that is undemanding and reassuring.

[end quotes from the article]

For more on the Heidegger essay referenced in by Mr. Kirsch, here is the Wikipedia entry on it.

-Julie

My Compositing Guidelines

1. (most important)  Don’t make a composite of anything that could just as easily be done in a straight photograph. Composites are for subjects, arrangements or contrivances that cannot be done in any other way.

2. Use only real materials. I don’t do fantasy (fairies, demons, morphed animals). Multiple copies, slice  dice and recombining inanimate materials is fine, but made-up critters and materials are not for me.

3. There has be to be a reason for the picture beyond “hey, look at this”. Pretty or clever is not enough. There needs to be something more going on in the image than just the immediate impact of shapes and colors; for example, satire, drama, suspense, mystery,  tension …

4. There are practical limitations on what can be done. Don’t kill yourself trying to composite with stuff that is inherently difficult to work with. This means staying away from objects that are fuzzy, hairy, texturally bumpy, or have a very large surface to body-mass ration. Playing with multiple objects at odd angles, having strong shadows that fall on wildly irregular surfaces, dealing with refractory and/or reflecting surfaces … can be done, but at this point, I’d hesitate to work with more than one or two such objects or surfaces in a single scene.

5. Inspiration for a picture or sets of pictures as often as not comes from the materials as opposed to from my preconception. In other words, I gather a lot of random stuff and then play with it. I get ideas in the playing, not in the gathering. There’s still a lot of the photographer in me: I still want to find as opposed to make.

-Julie

Free Will — On Sale!

I want free will. But I don’t want the high priced type that requires explaining the universe, the dimensions (space/time), the nature of time and causation. etc. I especially don’t want to deal with that 300 pound elephant of a question: how to have an uncaused cause.

I’m not interested (and not capable of) messing with those mind Olympics. What I want is some Walmart free will. Right here, right now; small, cheap, superficial, facile, just good enough to bounce the cue-ball of my imagination away from the conviction of determinism.

So I try on something flimsy, stretchy (one-size-fits-all) off the rack. I get one small corner of my spiritual, non-corporeal being that is uncaused and which, in turn, then generates thoughts and actions that are purely my own; not (purely) from my genetics, not (purely) from my environment, not (purely) for any external reasons which are themselves deterministic. Very cheap, but not very satisfying. I’d need a microscope to find the portion of my life that sourced from free will as opposed to all the rest.

If I go to a higher priced product, I might hope for multiple instances of free will. For unlimited use – where my decisions, thoughts and actions were (or seem to be) not caused by anything other than some uncaused cause that only I have access to.

However, having uncaused causes means having no reason for the cause. The same part of me that wants free will does not like things that happen for no reason. I want the model that goes really fast and is the most fun, but I also want the model that is perfectly safe and that won’t break.

When shopping for free will, it would be hypocritical to make ones choice based on reason so in the end, I’ll have to make a random choice, not based on pricing, not based on fit, and not based on the overhead video advertisements that Walmart is running, touting the extended warranty on certain models. But how does one make a truly random choice …? (I wonder if you can return free will – within 30 days?)

-Julie 

Backstory

Still pictures are always a little bizarre because they  are still; they purport to be a frozen moment. But there is no such thing as a moment and we never know anything that does not exist over some period of time as we watch or are conscious of it.

Therefore, when one looks at a still picture, one imagines a sort of fuzzy aura of possibility around what is seen. Where the stuff in it came from, where it’s going, its history, its full character. We search the image for clues. If it’s perfectly typical, it gets endowed with the full backstory of that person, or thing. Oh, yes, that is exactly  what so-and-so or such-and-such is like! Or, if it deviates from what is typical, that deviation becomes the focus/source/cause of the backstory invention.

If, however, you see two or more pictures of the same thing taken over a period of time, for example, Nicholas Nixon’s Brown Sisters  series, the cloud of imagined backstories thins to a line (maybe a thick line, but it’s no longer a multi-directional cloud). What now stands out to a viewer is not the things in the pictures, but the change between them. One is no longer inventing the backstory from memory and imagination, one is simply trying to track it as it happened out there.

In abstract images, the artist removes almost every clue to backstory, leaving only a few bits of suggestive form or color. If those fragments are well-chosen and all distraction is stripped away, the effect on a viewer can be to tap into wide-open fields of memory or invented story. The aurora-borealis of backstories.

-Julie

[I'm just chewing on these ideas; not at all sure they are on target.]

Pedigree and Producing to the Standard

Before any dog breed will be recognized by and accepted into the American Kennel Club (AKC) it must have records of several generations of breeding that is ‘pure’ (no mixture with other breeds). They must also have a breed standard which is a detailed description of what the ideal specimen will look like.

For example, a portion of the Poodle standard reads as follows:

Head and Expression
(a) Eyes– very dark, oval in shape and set far enough apart and positioned to create an alert intelligent expression. Major fault: eyes round, protruding, large or very light.

(b) Ears– hanging close to the head, set at or slightly below eye level. The ear leather is long, wide and thickly feathered; however, the ear fringe should not be of excessive length.

(c) Skull– moderately rounded, with a slight but definite stop. Cheekbones and muscles flat. Length from occiput to stop about the same as length of muzzle.

(d) Muzzle– long, straight and fine, with slight chiseling under the eyes. Strong without lippiness. The chin definite enough to preclude snipiness. Major fault: lack of chin. Teeth– white, strong and with a scissors bite. Major fault: undershot, overshot, wry mouth.

Many years ago, in one of the top show dog magazines, they ran a true story that was roughly as follows:

A family had gone to a leading poodle breeder’s home to buy a pet puppy. In show dog circles “pet” means a puppy that is not good enough to sell for show or breeding purposes. There are usually a few such in any given litter. The family had no particular knowledge of poodle beauty; they just wanted a nice pet.

The breeder brought out the puppy that was for sale and then talked for almost twenty minutes about its perfect eyes, the lovely shape of its muzzle, the excellent turn of its hocks, the ideal tightness of its feet and on and on.

At the end, the family looked at the puppy in silence for a few minutes, then one of the children said, timidly, “But its so ugly!”

To the breeder, the puppy was beautiful because its parents, and grandparents were all champions, and because its body conformed to the generally accepted expectations of generations of poodle breeders.

To the puppy buyers, it was just a homely little animal, about as attractive as a curly-haired rat. [end article]

I think the art world (including photography) is like this. To those immersed in the market, pictures have value because they have a pedigree and meet an external ’standard’ that has evolved over time within their specific community. Absent any knowledge of that pedigree or communal standard, those same pictures can lose most or all of their aesthetic appeal.

-Julie

Apple Impersonating Weston’s Pepper No. 30

It’s snowing here, which makes me depressed. I hate snow. So I’ve been farting around in Photoshop (always looking for an excuse…).

I made Edward Weston’s Pepper No. 30 from a Fuji apple. Just to see if I could. Took me about four hours. I could have polished up the light, if it was worth the trouble.

Here’s the color version, just to prove it was an apple. If I had intended the color one as the final, I would have worked to correct the color shift caused by the light manipulation. Would have been a lot harder.

-Julie

Cold Morning

This bird is a pine siskin. They are a close relative of, and normally the same size and shape as, a goldfinch. However, on this cold January morning, this fellow was wearing his double winter underwear. Not only that, he was totally pissed. No bird, large or small was going to budge him from his spot on the bird feeding railing.

Both the pine siskins and the goldfinches that come to my feeder are, as a rule, amazingly aggressive, especially when you consider how tiny they are (about the size of a longer, skinnier chickadee). But they will normally give ground if dive-bombed or threatened by a much bigger bird. Not this one.

Finally, a female cardinal — about four times bigger than him — tried to dislodge him by lunging and pecking at his head. The pine siskin gave a shriek, and the last I saw of that female cardinal, the siskin was attached to the side of her neck like a bulldog as they tumbled out of sight. A while later, the pine siskin reappeared and finished his breakfast. Nobody else even tried to bother him.

-Julie

Sour Grapes

A few days ago, Mike Johnston of The Online Photographer quoted Eliott Erwitt — who was in turn (roughly) quoting several thousand similarly insecure artists from the ages — as follows:

“All the technique in the world doesn’t compensate for an inability to notice.”

In the free .pdf online preview to the current issue of Lenswork magazine, Brooks Jensen says the following in his editorial titled “It’s Not What You See”:

“The old canard proposed that the core creative process in photography is seeing. However, people who see but can’t paint aren’t painters. Similarly, photography may not be about seeing but is definitely about what we make, what we create.”

If you agree that seeing and noticing are necessarily the same as used in the context of these two quotes, then the two opinions seem to be contradictory.

Chicken/egg, egg/chicken.

-Julie

Manly Colors

While slogging about the house and yard, I like to wear sweatshirts. They are warm, soft (not scratchy) and they don’t snag on puppy-dog teeth like knitted stuff does.

Last fall, my old  much-loved purple Russell Athletic sweatshirts finally more or less fell apart from wear and tear, so I went looking for new ones. Somewhere between the time I last shopped for sweats and now, they stopped making proper, thick, warm, sweatshirts in nice colors. There is something called “sweatshirt sweaters” which are just … sweaters. And there are sweatshirts that are made of “terry cotton” … which are about as thick as three layers of toilet paper.

Just in the nick of time, Lands End produced what they advertise as a super-duper sweatshirt, which is really just a regular sweatshirt, like they used to sell back in the good old days. But they are only for men. Because they are only for men, they come only in manly colors. That means gray, dark burgundy, forest green, navy, red, and black. I ended up, out of desperation for a nice thick sweatshirt, getting the forest green one. It’s so ugly that I only wear it in the early morning when it’s really cold and too dark to notice the color (also, I can usually wear a men’s small, but this one has sleeves that are at least six inches too long).

Why do mens’ clothes, even casual things like t-shirts and sweats, come in such ugly colors?

Do men really like these shades? Is this also true for non-clothing color choices? Looking at the (random) queue of critique requests for abstract photos at Photo.net, I don’t see any correlation between the gender of the photographer and what I see in their images — assuming a photographer will be attracted to colors he or she prefers when making abstract images (as opposed to subject matter that itself determines color content).

Recently there was a news release, covered by many news outlets including The Economist, about a scientific report that concluded that gender color preferences are real and have an evolutionary source.

This was followed by howls of protest from many scientific quarters. For example, this article at Bad Science presents a pretty good debunking of the evolutionary argument. I especially enjoy the follow-up comments posted at the bottom of the article at Bad Science.

-Julie