… Say you have seen something. You have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time’s soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what? [ read the story from the beginning ]
– from This is the Life by Annie Dillard
-Julie
… I assume that nonhuman species have personalities, intentions, emotions, awareness, even dreams and wishes. I do so for the sake of storytelling, and because the continuity of life on a genetic and morphological scale suggests a significant degree of fraternity among the creatures of the earth.
The above quote and those that follow are taken from Natalie Angier’s introduction to her book, The Beauty of the Beastly . Her attitude coincides nearly perfectly with my own. This is the attitude that underlies the way I depict nature in my composite pictures. Angier goes on to describe how, upon visiting a natural history museum, she noticed the similarities of the skeletons across many species; “… horses, alligators, monkeys, dogs, mice, birds, dolphins, humans.”
… here I was, blessed with a design that had passed the test of a dozen geological epochs, evidence that life has really gotten the hang of it, of building a mobile body that is strong yet light, supple and enduring, a body that can spin, soar, leap, dig, climb, flee, swing — that can embody life. I felt the beauty of the way that every beast, myself included, is born to move, to solve problems, to make the best of earth and gravity. I thought that bodies built of such analogous components must surely house nature’s built of similar sensations and inclinations: fear, joy, curiosity, boredom, friendliness, antipathy.
This is not to say that all animals react the same to the same events. (Obviously not. I may run away from roaches, but my cats will run fearlessly, even gleefully, toward them.) But I take for granted that other species are very much aware of themselves and their surroundings — that they have their own versions of consciousness. A spider consciousness. A cardinal grosbeak consciousness. This seems to me an act of courtesy — and an admission of ignorance. We don’t know what’s in another creature’s mind, so why assume it’s a blank? Why assume the animal is a programmed robot or a dumb brute, when it seems to be acting with all the neurotic uncertainty you’d expect of any individual that’s been thrown willy-nilly into the thick of life?
However, later in the Introduction, she admits that one chapter in the book belongs almost exclusively to humans:
The creative impulse may not be confined to us — think of the bower bird or even the dung beetle and its flawless brood ball — but we have taken it to far and away the most extravagant heights; the n of possibility here approaches infinity. That idea struck me recently while thumbing through a magazine and coming across an advertisement — probably for a tourist agency pitching the wonders of Rome — that showed a few postage-sized details of paintings by Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo. Small though they were, the pictures leaped off the page with their magnificence, leaped out of the magazine and its stubborn, two-dimensional dailiness; they were not the same stuff or species as the graphics or text that surrounded them. The same can be said for a line of Shakespeare or Rilke or Whitman — the roundness of the words, their intonation and texture, the swelling of one phrase, the stillness of the next — none of it sounds or tastes like ordinary language. With their genius, the artists strode far beyond humanness or animalness, or beginnings, middles, and ends — they disengaged themselves from the laws and the limits of nature.
I think that last sentence, lovely though it is, goes off the rails. I think that artists recognize shared skeletons within and across all forms of communication; real or figurative “horses, alligators, monkeys, dogs, mice, birds, dolphins, humans” — they see the bones. If the artist is good, you will see the bones too.
-Julie
[ Say it out loud. ]
Wants pawn term dare worsted ladle gull hoe lift wetter murder inner ladle cordage honor itch offer lodge, dock, florist. Disk ladle gull orphan worry Putty ladle rat cluck wetter ladle rat hut, an fur disk raisin pimple colder Ladle Rat Rotten Hut.
Wan moaning Ladle Rat Rotten Hut’s murder colder inset.
“Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, heresy ladle basking winsome burden barter an shirker cockles. Tick disk ladle basking tutor cordage offer groin-murder hoe lifts honor udder site offer florist. Shaker lake! Dun stopper laundry wrote! Dun stopper peck floors! Dun daily-doily inner florist, an yonder nor sorghum-stenches, dun stopper torque wet strainers”
“Hoe-cake, murder,” resplendent Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, an tickle ladle basking an stuttered oft.
Honor wrote tutor cordage offer groin-murder, Ladle Rat Rotten Hut mitten anomalous woof.
“Wail, wail, wail” set disk wicket woof, “Evanescent Ladle Rat Rotten Hut Wares are putty ladle gull goring wizard ladle basking?”
“Armor goring tumor groin-murder’s,” reprisal ladle gull. “Grammar’s seeking bet. Armor ticking arson burden barter an shirker cockles.”
– the beginning of Ladle Rat Rotten Hut. To read the rest, go to this page [ link ] and scroll to find it.
Wants pawn term dare worsted ladle gull hoe hat search putty yowler coils debt pimple colder Guilty Looks. Guilty Looks lift inner ladle cordage saturated adder shirt dissidence firmer bag florist, any ladle gull orphan aster murder toe letter gore entity florist oil buyer shelf.
– beginning of Guilty Looks Enter Tree Beers. To read the rest, go here (same page as above).
Center Alley worse jester pore ladle gull hoe lift wetter stop-murder an toe heft-cisterns. Daze worming war furry wicket an shellfish parsons, spatially dole stop-murder, hoe dint lack Center Alley an, infect, word orphan traitor pore gull mar lichen ammonol dinner hormone bang.
– can you figure that one by yourself? If not, go to the page and read more.
Marry hatter ladle limb
Itch fleas worse widest snore.
An ever-wear debt Marry win
Door limb worse shorter gore.
Pitter Paper peeked or parker peckled paupers
Or packer peckled paupers pitter paper peeked
Aft Pitter Paper peeked or packer peckled paupers
Ware aster packer peckled paupers debt pitter paper peeked?
All of the above are from Anguish Languish, by Howard L. Chace, originally published in 1956 and read on Sir Arthur Godfrey’s TV show at the time — and copied by me from Kevin Rice’s Anguish Languish page.
The Arthur Godfrey show was way before my time but I ran across these many years ago in Robin Williams’s The Non-Designers Design Book and loved them. Still do.
-Julie
Frank Horvat : Is that your reason for always going back to the same places?
Joseph Koudelka : It’s the reason why photography was easier in the beginning. It’s like a dart game: at the beginning, you can toss them anywhere, they will always be well placed. Wherever you hit is the right place ( in English in the original ). But once you start building something, you realize that certain pieces are missing.
– from the first interview of Koudelka by Horvat in January 1987. Below is from a follow-up interview done in March of that same year:
Joseph Koudelka : … If there is something that you like and that you are interested in, and if, in addition, you have some ability and a little energy to spend, it’s bound to work. The program will function. But what is important, afterwards, is to leave the program behind and to move ahead. It would be too easy to let yourself become a prisoner of what you have built, to let the results come out automatically. At some point, one must destroy the program, and start a new one from scratch.
Frank Horvat : Yes. When I was doing my essay on trees, I realized that as my work was proceeding, my program would get more and more precise, to the point that in the end it became a limitation, making me do the same photographs over and over!
Joseph Koudelka : I am not interested in repetition. I don’t want to reach the point from where I wouldn’t know how to go further. It’s good to set limits for oneself, but there comes a moment when we must destroy what we have constructed.
Every destination turns out to be a stepping stone to somewhere else. Are you changing your mind, or are you closing in on what is always the same target?
Koudelka was an aeronautical engineer before he became a photographer full time.
Joseph Koudelka : I don’t know what’s important to the people who look at my photos. What’s important to me is to make them. I work all the time, but there are only a few of my photos that I find really good. I am not even sure that I am really a good photographer. I think that anyone working as I do could do the same. But my purpose is not to prove my talent. I photograph almost every day, except when it’s too cold for traveling the way I do – as in this time of winter. Sometimes my photos are OK, other times they are not, but I think that eventually something will come out of my work. I don’t worry about it. I also take photos of my own life, such as those at the beginning of the small paperback book: of my feet, of my watch. When I am tired I lie down, and if I feel like photographing and there is nobody around me, I photograph my own feet. They are not great photos, some people dislike them. For a similar reason, I always photograph the places where I sleep, and the interiors where I spend some time. It’s a rule that I have given to myself, because these are things that one forgets. Maybe one day I’ll make a book with them, nothing but those little photos. It may upset some people who know me only as the photographer of gypsies, and who don’t want to see me any other way. But I don’t care about what people think, I don’t try to change people. Nor to change the world.
I used to take pictures of my feet all the time. Because … they’re there.
-Julie
On Thursday night, I watched the DVD, What Remains, which is a documentary about photographer Sally Mann.
She got access to, and is shown in, the Body Farm:
It consists of a 3-acre wooded plot, surrounded by a razor wire fence. At any one time there will be a number of bodies placed in different settings throughout the facility and left to decompose. The bodies are exposed in a number of ways in order to provide insights into decomposition under varying conditions: for example, some are left out in the open or in the woods …
Mann had hands-on (or gloves-on) access to the bodies. Wow! Totally cool.
Also in the show, after one of her dogs died, she kept it (above ground), observing it closely for 18 months as it decomposed – down to the last bits of crumbling bone (actually, one toenail).
Oh, and there was some photography, too.
[ It's a really good show. You can rent it from Netflix or buy it from Amazon for $26.99 (I did, and that's unusual since I am a real cheapskate). ]
-Julie
Beginnings of a bird’s nest. Found on the ground after a recent wind storm.
Analogous, in one way or another, to all of my recent posts. ( Of course you, clever reader, already knew that. )
-Julie
I am going to try and give you a rough feel for what goes into making a big composite, using the bird picture that I am currently working on as my example.
First, a brief explanation of what the pictures are about. To me, it’s wonderfully astonishing that I can take a bunch of little balls of colored fluff, drop them onto a piece of paper, and by the slightest variations of relative positions, of body english (what there is of it in a bird’s body), and direction of the eyes — express fear, desire, irritation, curiosity … aliveness. All of this often intense emotion … out of what?
I start by choosing a background from a group of photos I took before the leaves came out last winter. Next, I choose a vine that will run parallel above the stone table which is at the base of the setup (the stone table, made from five rocks, is the same throughout this series).
Then I choose a few birds (usually three) that I think are especially interesting. I try to pick them without any regard to the other two that I’ve chosen. I used to start with one really nice bird (I called this the “keystone” bird) and then pick every one after that as reactive to that first one. That’s how I did with the entire Judgement Day series. But I think that results in too linear a composition when using as many birds as I am in this new series (usually ten). By picking three unrelated birds, and then figuring a way to make them “work” in the picture frame, I force myself to find multiple and/or more complicated interactions.
I almost always start with at least one of the big, colorful birds — male cardinals, bluejays, towhees, or red-bellied woodpeckers. Because of their size and colorfulness, they are going to dominate the composition, so it would be foolish to try to bring them late in the development of the scene. Usable birds have been sorted into folders by species, already converted from the RAW files; cropped but not extracted (cut out) from their original background. I have, for example, 990 male cardinals, but only 148 bluejays.
Big birds, and especially big birds with crests and chin whiskers (cardinals and bluejays) take quite a while to extract, so I try to make my decisions about which one to use without actually seeing them in the layout. But round, smooth little birds like juncos and chickadees are so easy to mask (extract) that I will usually cut out the best candidates so I can see them in the layout before choosing.
I have 1292 juncos and 1134 chickadees to choose from so I use them (and the 1200 titmouses) the most in all the pictures. Picking is tedious; you have to scroll down slowly through the collection, while looking at the birds already in the composite. It takes a long time to get through that many birds while evaluating whether each will fit into the dynamics of the picture. Below, you see the rough layout for this picture (positioning is only approximate at this stage).
I have chosen all of the birds except for the two chickadees that I want to use (the littlest birds; black and white, one upper left, one lower right). See if you can choose the best two. There are four candidates for the upper left position, and three for the lower right spot.
Which of the possible twelve combinations of chickadees is best in the overall composition?
After I choose which chickadees to use, I’ll have to do some scaling (both male cardinals look too small to me). Then they will all require extensive cleaning. Legs have to be moved. Feet repositioned. Beaks cleaned and often reconstructed (sunflower seeds will often blot out the whole beak). The upper cardinal needs a tail. Edges have to be lightened or darkened then merged to the background according to sharpness.
When all have been scrubbed clean, then I will “turn on the lights”. In this series the light is always from either upper right or upper left according to how I see the composition. Always somewhat backlit.
One of the most interesting things about compositing is that when adding the light (or, more precisely, first adding the shadows) I can light almost all of the picture — in this case the five stones, the vine, and nine of the ten birds — and it won’t look that much different. But the minute I do the light on the very last bird, all of a sudden the picture just bursts into life. It’s very cool. Goes to prove that as with all photographic art, it’s the light that makes the picture.
I’ll show the finished composite once it’s done.
-Julie
For me, 1968 is not a year, it’s a symbol of one of the more remarkable “disruptions” in American life: the kind that has acted repeatedly to remind us that the world is what we ourselves make it. Agency, the sixties declared, was the name of the game. To not exercise agency was to be written out of history by those who do exercise it.
The above is a quote from Vivian Gornick’s response in Dissent magazine’s forum article called 1968: Lessons Learned. Ms. Gornick goes on to say:
It was as though the insight had been newly minted, that’s how powerful it seemed in 1968. Out of this impassioned sense of newness there erupted an explosion of hidden grievance from sections of the body politic—women, gays, students—that had either never, or not in a century, been driven to open rebellion. Again, it was the combination of influences at work that made the outbreak so electrifying. While the conventionally organized left delivered the analysis, it was the over-the-top counterculture brashness that pointed directly at the places where it hurt; made ordinary citizens cry out at other ordinary citizens, Don’t you get it? This is how we feel. And now that we know how we feel, this is how far we intend to go, how many bridges we’re willing to burn.
The sixties was never a matter of revolution in the classical sense of replacing one system of government with another; it was always a matter of achieving the democracy we thought was our birthright, not only as Americans but as world citizens. Essentially, that meant the right not to feel exiled from oneself. What began with a listing of the crimes of imperial capitalism evolved into an individual need—the personal was indeed political—to understand the way that sex, race, and class have so indelibly separated us not only from our fellow creatures, but from ourselves. We lived, in the sixties, to see this centuries-long urgency made conscious once again; to see the blacks, gays, and women in our midst take the historical lesson: when politically despised, you either fight on your feet or die on your knees.
In my view, the liberationist movements of the sixties are America’s enduring contribution to twentieth-century internationalism. They made millions around the world feel what they knew: the damnable injustice of being born into a body categorically destined for exclusion from the human enterprise. The decade altered forever the shared sensibility of Western culture, and opened a Pandora’s Box of hope and anxiety. The world we now occupy is the one still exhausting itself in what I think is a useless effort to close the box.
Other extracts from responses to the forum article that I enjoyed are from Lillian B. Rubin:
Stokely Carmichael, a leader in the civil rights struggle replied to a question about the position of women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) with the single word “prone.” A joke, he explained later. Yeah, right.
White men were no better. In one of the most shameful incidents of the time, men at the national convention of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) jeered women who sought a voice in organizational policy off the stage with catcalls, suggesting that their place was either on their backs or at the coffee machines. It was an event that gave impetus to what was then the infant Women’s Liberation Movement, tagged derisively and dismissively by male commentators as “Women’s Lib.”
From Christine Stansell:
Women’s liberation broke with the New Left in 1968, but militant feminism retained many of the left’s habits and much of its style well into the 1980s: the heavy-handed theorizing, the scorn for compromise, the insistence that life was lived in blacks and whites and not in grays, the penchant for theatrical display, the faith that sheer will could bring about a perfect—or near-perfect—society purged of wrongs, and the scorn for liberalism and government. In 1968 it was widely assumed that nothing good, absolutely nothing, could come from government, which was a shill for the (male) (white) ruling class. In the women’s movement, liberal democracy seemed, if anything, even more alien and contemptible, since there was hardly a woman in sight in high office.
Though the feminist responses particularly interested me, there are many more general texts, for example from Ralf Fuecks:
The discovery of politics in everyday practice, the practical improvement of society from within and below, a cosmopolitan attitude, a passion for open politics, sustained social commitments, an insistence on self-determination and democratic participation. These, too, are legacy of 1968—it’s a lot.
Take your pick from the main index to the forum respondents [ link ].
Also on the Dissent site, there is an good article, The Supreme Court: Missing in Action by David Fontana:
We have endured years of a politics largely devoid of a necessary discussion of individual rights—and of a politics where rights advocates did not enjoy the support of the revered Supreme Court. Instead, we have a Court happy to call on various branches of government to act, but content to give them carte blanche when it comes to how to act. As a result, too many have been tortured, held without hearings, and had their privacy violated—and fighting those practices now is even more of an uphill battle than it needs to be. If the Supreme Court had intervened, things could have been different, and we would all be the better for it.
And another, Talking to Enemies by Michael Walzer.
==========================================
How does 1968 relate to photography in 2008? Aside from the fundamental changes brought about within society since then, the attitude described by Vivian Gornick, “the world is what we ourselves make it”, bleeds over into everything we do, especially the art that we make. Both the hope and the anxiety.
-Julie
The closing sentence of an article at Dissent magazine called The Breakthrough: Feminism and Literary Criticism by Judith B. Walzer reads as follows:
Remembering these books should help to rescue the entire critical enterprise from the persistent distractions that threaten to make it irrelevant. These critics know that the realities of life and literature are too engaging, too important, to get stuck out there where there is no subject—except a theory and one’s own self-conscious use of it. This body of work always has a subject outside of itself, a subject that is as relevant today as it was when the books were written. It is worth reading (or re-reading) to see how criticism ought to be practiced.
Because I value theory highly, I find this statement interesting and possibly disagreeable. I changed the wording of the statement to make it be about photography:
Remembering these commentaries on photography should help to rescue the entire critical enterprise from the persistent distractions that threaten to make it irrelevant. These critics know that the realities of life and photographs are too engaging, too important, to get stuck out there where there is no subject — except a theory and one’s own self-conscious use of it. This body of work always has a subject outside of itself, a subject that is as relevant today as it was when the commentaries were written. It is worth reading (or re-reading) to see how criticism ought to be practiced.
There are many photographers out there who like to insist that photography at its best should be either entirely or at least primarily about the subject “outside itself”. I agree with that, but I disagree with the strongly implied subtext which is that the subject is purely indexical, not metaphorical.
Try inverting the quote to see how it feels in reverse:
These critics know that a theory and ones own self-conscious use of it are too engaging, too important, to get stuck out there where there is no theory — except for the realities of life and photographs. This body of work always has self-conscious use of theory, a theory that is as relevant today as it was when the commentaries were written.
(Apologies to Ms. Walzer for chewing up her words to my own ends. It is, by the way, a good article, if you’re interested in the subject. [ link ] )
-Julie
