picture window # 17 ~ Brooklyn brownstone kitchen
Tuesday, November 25, 2008 at 09:38AM 
Kitchen window ~ Brooklyn, NY • click to embiggenI worry at times that bringing up subjects such as metaphors will result in a loss of audience. The response to yesterday's entry and questions does little to dispel that anxiety.
Nevertheless, I will continue along the same path with today's entry simply because as I was creating yesterday's entry I had thought of this picture as another fine example of something used, or regarded as being used, to represent something else. And, I also thought that I might inject a little bit of past personal history, re: metaphors.
My high school learning experience was a fairly demanding one - an all-male Jesuit institution. For those who don't know, the Jesuits are demanding taskmasters. Much is expected of students during their learning experience, especially regarding the development of one's ability to think. Not to memorize and regurgitate, but rather to figure things out.
One arena in which this was put to the test was that of literature. We had required reading lists galore - Summer reading lists, course reading lists, read it instead of having fun reading lists, sitting on the bus reading lists - you name, we had it. There was usually total freedom to choose the book you wished to read from the lists and you could put off the required reading for a while but eventually you had to pay the piper in the form of a book report.
Because everyone may have read a different book, there was no class discussion about the books so a book report had to be the product of your own making. What was expected in a book report was fairly detailed analysis of all of the usual suspects, literature-wise - plot line, character development, etc. - and the one device that always messed with me was identifying and describing, yep, you guessed it - metaphor, with allegory running a close second. BTW, with hindsight and a bit of rationalization, I chalk this up to the callowness of youth.
To this day, I read fiction on an almost purely literal level. To put it simply, I like good stories. The gooder, the better. My preference runs towards books in leftover / discount bins that have pictures of submarines, jet fighters, handguns (that a spy might carry), or splotches of blood (murder / mayhem mysteries). I read these things in bunches, just like eating a bowl of popcorn.
And, sure sure, their is a bit of metaphor / allegory to found. Usually a very little bit and that, most often, of the basic and cliched good vs. evil variety. But, for me, these things are very easy to digest. They are the equivalent of photographic eye candy, if you will.
3 or 4 times a year, there is such a pile of these books that we pack them up and take them over to the used bookstore here in town and just give them away. None of these books are "keepers". They are, in very real sense, disposable. But every once in a while, I buy a John Le Carré novel and that is something to savor and save - there are 5 or 6 of them on one of our many bookshelves. I know that I will return to these books to re-read, re-savor, and re-discover them.
Le Carré's novesl are rich and complex, full of details and character development and just like real life, his stories do not always have a "happy ending". The good guys are good but usually not all good. Good does not always defeat evil. Sometimes it struggles just to stay even. In short, his stories are great little vignettes of what it means to be human.
All of that said, here's the thing about metaphor and allegory - I still read Le Carré's novels literally. I do not sit around during or after reading them and pick them apart, literary devise wise. What I have discovered is that that the best literary devices get inside your head without you recognizing that they are literary devices or that they have pierced your mental defenses. They cause the reader to assimilate expanded messages and meaning almost without consciously being aware of it. In effect, the reader emerges from the reading experience as a more informed person without even knowing it.
IMO, I believe that the same is true of good pictures. At first glance, we may be attracted to such pictures purely on their ability to capture and hold the eye. But, I know, for me, that a really good picture also seems to trigger a little undefined twinge, a little tickle, somewhere in the back of my mind. A sensation that there is more to what I am seeing than meets the eye.
Given the chance and a willing ear, I will speculate and postulate to no small degree about what that little tingle might be about. And that exercise is always fun, especially more so if the willing ear also is associated with a flapping mouth that speculates and postulates in return. Invariably, all the windy flapping centers around something used, or regarded as being used, to represent something else. rarely, if ever, does the word "metaphor" surface, but, in fact .....
However, I don't find that that little bit of fun is always required in order to "enjoy" a picture. Sometimes what a picture has to say beyond the obvious just seems to settle in without a whole lot of thought required. In part because, with a really good still picture in hand (in a book, on a wall, where ever) you always have the option of returning to it and seeing it anew.
All of that said, my picture window series uses interior space and the view of what's outside that space as a metaphor for the space inside one's head and what's outside of that space - the other. We all build/make comfortable spaces, literally and figuratively, that we call "home". The place where you live, whether it's an actual home or the space inside our head.
You would be sorely lacking in a vital aspect of being human if you did not or could not do so. But, no matter where you go or what you "build", there is always the other. That which is outside of yourself, your comfort zones. That which does not conform to your will, your control, or your wishes. Consequently, there is always the matter of engaging and integrating the other.
IMO, to try and live a life without fully engaging and integrating the other is a recipe for human folly.
So, once again, I ask - are you aware of metaphor in the pictures of others? Do you ever experience the "tingle"? Does the use of metaphor have a place in your picturing?
Or, does a picture like today's picture window sink or swim entirely upon its visual interest or lack thereof? Or, can you get outside of yourself and get inside of it? Is it even worth the effort to try and get inside of it?
In closing, consider this (something that I have always felt was one of the driving forces in my picture making):
Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn't attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don't see. - Emmet Gowin
Reader Comments (4)
I read the picture window series in a different way, especially the last two. I see the inside as the confinement of thinking and outside as the attraction of endless possibilities. In each, I'd rather be outside than in.
Mark,
The question of metaphors in photography is a slippery terrain.
A lot of people tried to create bridges between natural language and visual representations. The problem is that visual concepts (as you have many times stressed out) pertain to the strict personal experience domain and as such not shareable, only the surface is shareable and photography is all about surface (except surgery photography :-). In the natural language we can understand the others in terms of a common use of the same words in a more or less common context but if you try to dig a bit under the words you will find that at the end is like skinning an onion. Take away the conventions and you will be left with nothing.
To the picture. No I do not see a metaphor, at least not in the sense you mention. What I feel is a sense of emptiness and loneliness, something well beloved missing (the light on the table). But frankly I do not care much about it and I not even sure if it is only a projection of mine at the moment.
By the way I always enjoy your reds.
Gotta love Martin's comment!
It's plausible to see the window as an eye (metaphor) and analogize inside/outside the room to inside/outside the mind, i.e. self/other as you suggest. But like Martin, I don't want to think of that sterile, geometric place as representing me in some way.
What might be more generally recognizable and acceptable is that you are presenting two worlds. Rather than necessarily identify with one, what came to mind for me is the choice. Were there people at that table who chose to leave for the outside? In the earlier brownstone bedroom, clearly there were people who left; their disheveled bed quite a contrast to the neat room.
This view doesn't have to be at odds with the self/other interpretation. After all, aren't you sometimes more inside yourself, and sometimes more out there? The mind may technically live inside the head, but you can cast your focus and attention outside.
Oh yes, the "tingle". That's what I love about great pictures, the internal itch that says there is something here. Those are the pictures I want to be with, that connect on a deep level, the ones I want to try to figure out. I usually can't fully figure them out but I know they connect to me somehow. That' what keeps me coming back to them, thinking about them when I'm not with them.
I guess I connect to a picture on more of a gut level than on an intellectual level. The allegorical figurings aren't what what get me, it's something that's pre-verbal. I think visual metaphor can connect to the gut but the reasoned out verbal figurings might be interesting after something more preconscious grabs me first. What is that, I don't know. Maybe its the beginning of an understanding of the allegory. Or maybe it's the connection to a more emotional metaphor. Or maybe its liking a pretty picture.
I think my pictures are more the record of exploration than an attempt at metaphor. Now, I think the best of my pictures become a metaphor, that they some how can become a metaphor for what it is to be human. I think the best pictures "tingle" us precisely because of that connection to what it is to be human. Or maybe not, I don't really know.
(You've done it again, got me thinking! I should be working on something else. Oh well.)