The Photograph as Thing

“Snatching the moment away from the body of time, photography places the image once and for all in the past and in a way puts it to death along with everything that happened to be caught in the photograph. The hope that while preserving the image of the present one also prolongs its existence is probably illusory. “Oh, moment, stay!” – alas, photography is not able to answer that call. The duration of the moment is but a psychological impression.” [ from an essay  about the art of Prażmowski]

“Our aesthetic pleasure is based on the tension between our idea of a [the subject of the photo] and what has happened to that idea in the course of its embodiment in [the print]. This latter point demonstrated how important the expectations of the viewer are in the total experience of art. Your  idea of [whatever it is] contends with the artist’s  idea, which is physically palpably there to assert its validity. Perhaps you are convinced that [the photographer's] construction deserves to exist independently, for its own sake. If so, you have probably gone through a process of reconciling your ideas of balance, motion, and form with the sensations you receive from the [print] before you.” – taken from the book ‘Varieties of Visual Experience’ by Edmund Burke Feldman with substitution of photography terms (in square brackets) for that of steel sculpture in the original text

Two quotes taken completely out of context — to make you think about what a photograph really is.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Doubt is Good

I once saw in interview on TV of a prominent scientist (I think it was Carl Sagan, but I can’t remember, daggone it) where they were talking about the Apollo missions to the moon. The interviewer eventually asked the scientist if he found it offensive or outrageous that there were people who didn’t believe we had gone to the moon — that it was all a hoax. To my amazement, Sagan (or whoever it was) said, no! absolutely not! He then went on to say that doubt was essential to science. There must always be people questioning everything, everywhere, all the time, no matter how absurd or ridiculous it looks to those who don’t doubt.

Ptolemy was wrong. Galileo was wrong. Copernicus was wrong. Kepler was wrong. Newton was (somewhat) wrong. As of 1900, everybody was wrong, and by 2100, probably everything we now believe to be true will turn out to be wrong. Had there been nobody ready to question, to doubt, to push against the boundaries of what was considered to be true, there would be no science. Today’s information is probably tomorrow’s misinformation. And today’s misinformation may be tomorrow’s information.

The danger is not so much from misinformation as from certainty — at any level of society.

This is a response to a thoughtful posting  by Felix Grant in his blog, The Growlery.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Where Are the Bears?

Once, on a cold misty day when walking home along an old logging road, I came upon a dead deer lying in the middle of the road with her heart ripped out. She was unmarked except for a bloody hole in her chest. No sign of a struggle, no damage to her head, neck or legs.

Later, a local old-timer told me that bears were known to do this, though I don’t find it in any of the text descriptions of black bear diet. However, I can’t think of anything else that could have done it.

[photo above is taken from Wikipedia Commons]

I was (and still am) in the habit of taking long hikes by myself into the wilderness almost always off-road. I know the area very well, having hiked all over it for many years now. While I was aware that bears were there, I was under the impression that they were not any kind of real threat as long as I didn’t shoot them or mess with mothers with cubs. After seeing the dead doe, I started taking them a bit more seriously.

I have been charged by bears twice. One was described in an earlier post; the other happened on ridge right behind my house. The bear was in a tree (before I got there) and came tearing down, making an incredible amount of noise, jumping the last ten feet, and hitting the ground running — toward me. It charged directly through the intervening underbrush until it burst onto the old logging road on which I was standing (and by then, shouting), whereupon it did a perfect 180 and ran back the way it had come. I have no idea what provoked it, though hunters have told me that bears have terrible eyesight, so it may have mistaken me for another bear (to which I take offense!).

I have had a variety of other semi-close encounters, and many distant sightings or ‘hearings’.

According to my Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries calendar, the mother bears have their babies in February (other sources say they have them in January). Cubs aren’t able to get around for about three months, so the mothers must have to stay in or near their dens for that amount of time. Which makes me wonder where the heck those dens might be. I have never seen a bear in a den. There’s a lot of terrain around me that should appeal to bears — nice and rocky with thick laurel patches (shown below is the side of the upper end of the ridge on which my house sits).

I have quite a few places that are near my hiking routes that look like they might appeal to a mother bear. So, yesterday, I set out with my camera to see if any of them were at home. As this is really a stupid thing to do when you have a Jack Russell accompanying you, it’s a good thing I didn’t find any bears.

I wonder where they are? Especially since it was almost seventy degrees yesterday, and the mothers should be feeling pretty grumpy.

More information on bears, go here. For information on bear hibernation and dens, go here. For a story about a dummy who lives not too far from me; who shot a 600 pound bear repeatedly, then crawled around in the laurel after it — and got mauled, go here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Why I Don’t Do Landscapes

The two photos below were taken yesterday from directly above my house. You can just see the roof through the chaos of the forest.

I say “above” because the house is stuck on the top of the lower end of a ridge that rises very steeply behind it. And, no, I didn’t use a telephoto to compress all those branches. The pictures were made with a 60mm lens on my little Rebel XTi.

If I climb further up the ridge and try to shoot the view, there are always trees in the way.

There is a very cool rock cliff on one side of the valley in which I live. But just try to get a picture of it. In the series below, the one on the left and the one in center were taken from the far side of the valley. The one on the right was taken from the ridge closest to the cliff. You’ll have to take my word for it — there is a rock cliff there in all that underbrush.

If I hike up to High Top Mountain, which takes me about a half hour, I can get panoramas, but that’s only because the top has been cleared and is kept clear by yearly bush-hogging.

In the aerial photo below (taken a while ago), my house is at the red arrow. The rock slide is about at the blue arrow, though it’s hidden from view in a ravine. The green arrow points to High Top Mountain. I am the only human being living in all of the area shown by this photo (the house you see on center is abandoned). But if you go out the front/bottom of the photo, you will find a rural community. I’m only 10 minutes from the post office and a grocery store. We even have a stop light!

 It’s rare to see really good wilderness landscapes of the mid-Atlantic (US) states. Eliot Porter did some nice work in the Smokies, if I remember correctly, but most of his stuff is from New England, which is not the same. The forest is just too dense.

-Julie

 http://www.unrealnature.com/

My Role Model

“One evening Harold decided to go for a walk in the moonlight. But there wasn’t any moon, and Harold needed a moon for a walk in the moonlight. Fortunately, he had brought his purple crayon. So he drew a moon. He also needed something to walk on. So he drew a path. And thus begins one of the most imaginative and enchanting adventures in all of children’s books. Originally written 50 years ago, this beloved story has intrigued children and kept them absorbed for generations, as page by page unfolds the dramatic and clever adventures of Harold and his purple crayon.” – blurb from the MoMA store

I want to be Harold (or Haroldette).

If you grew up without reading “Harold and the Purple Crayon” by Crockett Johnson, find more information here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Horribly Nice

Psychotherapist Jo Ellen Gryzb “found herself huddled in her bedroom with her husband one Christmas, whispering about how on earth they were going to get rid of their house guests. “I had no idea how to tell them they had overstayed,” she says. “I was a complete walkover.” … Gryzb believes the symptoms of niceness are everywhere: every time we let someone off the hook, can’t say no, avoid conflict to keep the peace, feel guilty when we ask for something, and get roped into something we don’t want to do. – quoted from this article

Scroll to the bottom of the page and study the ten-step guide to getting tough.

People who are too nice are almost as annoying as those (common on the Internet) who are the opposite.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Being Expressionless in Museums and Galleries

Most people don’t scream or cry while looking at works of art in galleries or musems. Does this mean they don’t get the full impact of what they are looking at? Maybe, maybe not. If joy and wonder work the same as disgust and revulsion, then the following experiment seems to suggest that suppressing your reaction may, in fact, amplify the effect.

The following is from an article on Science Daily called, “Disgusting Videos Used to Study Coping Methods“:

“Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to observe neural activity in people’s brains as they employed each of the two methods in coping with one of the most visceral of human emotions: disgust.

“Keeping your face still while watching these disgusting film clips actually resulted in an increase in neural activity in the amygdala and insula,” Goldin said. “During the 15-second film clip, the emotional reactivity is increasing and billowing while you’re watching the film clip, and the time when it becomes hardest to implement the ‘keep your face still’ instruction, the suppression, is at the end of each clip when the emotional intensity is really increasing.”" [end first quote]

In the article, they say that all participants were women, and they screened their subjects, removing anybody who thought they couldn’t deal with the requirements. This seems to pretty much ruin the experiment (they have already selected for those who are going to react within a desired range). Also, from the article:

“The vision of a lone patient in a medical laboratory, lying stock still on a table poised in a narrow tunnel through the center of a huge cube of a machine, smooth-sided and whitely sterile, with head held in place as disgusting videos unfold on a screen 6 inches from her eyeballs, may seem a little reminiscent of the reprogramming scenes in A Clockwork Orange. But the researchers actually took great care to avoid traumatizing anyone.” I wonder how they can be sure.

But getting back to what this suggests about viewing art without showing any response, maybe bottling up ones feelings actually intensifies response.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Pawns

The subliminal drip, drip, drip of the daily news goes on like a distant dial-tone behind ones local/personal concerns. But out of nowhere, some minor detail brings the distant news to the surface.

While doing interminable RAW conversions of my bird photos, I noticed that one of the goldfinches was banded. The whole banding, radio-collaring, tracking thing that goes on with wildlife researchers gives me the creeps, but I didn’t think much about that until I realized, half an hour later, in my semi-comatose doing-RAW-conversions state, I had begun obsessing about for-the-greater-good current events — surveillance, eavesdropping, curtailing of civil rights, torture …

For birds with strong beaks such as eagles, they put the bands on with rivets  to make sure they can’t get them off.

While banding is considered to be completely safe, banders do need to be aware  that “bands too small for the species in question may cause serious injury to or even loss of the banded leg. … Injuries may result from a bander’s failure to anticipate future growth of young birds, to adequately consider size dimorphism when choosing band size or the risk of a large band slipping over the foot, or to recognize that determination of how many bands can be safely fitted on one leg is a species-specific issue. Two or more aluminum bands should not be applied to the same leg, as they may flange over and injure the leg.”

Then there is the matter of repeatedly catching and handling birds.

 Yes, I know, it’s “for their own good” or at least the long term good of the species if not for the individual being snagged in mist nets and then wearing a metal boot for life.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Trompe-lœil

Isn’t it amazing that you can make sense out of the four bird faces shown below? Our brains are hard-wired to see these as 3D objects rather than unreadable nonsense.

Good thing too, because photography depends entirely on this kind of brain response when creating the illusion of deep space that is so wonderful in the camera’s final flat paper output.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Photoshop and Democracy

“It may seem trivial to hem and haw over teardrops, football players, and homemakers. Our philosophers, however, remind us that the survival of democracy itself may depend on paying attention to such distinctions.”

That’s a quote from an article, “What’s Wrong with This Picture?”  by John Mitchell from The New York Review of Magazines (the article is not dated, but it’s probably from summer 2007). In it, he asks three philosophers, Robert Sokolowski (phenomenologist), Peter Singer (preference utilitarian), Arthur C. Danto (professor of philosophy) discuss the issue:

“What exactly makes a photograph a photograph, and when do alterations stop being brushups and start being deceptions? Can a photo be manufactured to illustrate a point, just as words are constructed to compose a headline? What role does disclosure play in justifying manipulations and maintaining the reader’s trust? Are “photo illustrations,” which is what magazines often call their manipulated photos, works of art, and is it a journalist’s role to be artistic?”

(The quotes below are bits and pieces taken out of context.)

“Sokolowski calls this difference between photos and paintings a distinction between trace and testimony. A photograph is a straightforward trace of reality. A painting is one artist’s testimony of reality.

“Surprisingly, Danto sees nothing wrong with this, when understood in terms of a rhetoric of images. “What they did was create a picture that was equivalent to the language that they used,” Danto said. “Either they’re both true or they’re both false.”

“As a preference utilitarian, he [Singer] holds that for something to be morally right, “it has to lead to the satisfaction of preferences of all sentient beings, now and in future.”

“You can argue that an informed public is necessary for a sound democratic process,” he said, “and that a sound democratic process will satisfy more preferences in the long run than a process that isn’t a good democracy. So the preference that I think counts here is not the immediate ones of the people who see the photo right now, but the contribution that [the photo] makes to having a reliable form of journalism that people can take as something that will inform them about important issues.” So, while a Martha Stewart photo might seem trivial, Singer points out that it’s important in maintaining the trust of readers—and even preserving our democracy.

“Sokolowski concurs with Singer that disclosure is essential when presenting a manipulated photo, but he is not optimistic about prominent, plainspoken disclosure ever becoming common practice. Journalists don’t want to adopt such practices, he said, “because they get rhetorical leverage by making it look like a real photo.”" [end quotes]

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I disagree with their conclusions. I think democracy specifically rests on an attentive, involved population that is always prepared to question what it is told (and shown) and to consider possible alternatives. Obviously we prefer and strive to have honest and accurate sources of information, but the idea that it was better when (if) we had blind, unquestioning trust in the truth of our media is just wrong. By generating healthy skepticism in the non-photographer, I think Photoshop may well be very good for democracy.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/