man & nature # 100 ~ symbols of reality vs reality
Monday, February 23, 2009 at 01:03PM 
Fresh wet snow on a garden bed • click to embiggenWe here at our house subscribe to the monthly magazine The Sun. I can't speak for the wife but I like the magazine because its publishing philosophy is much like my own idea about / approach to picture making -
The Sun is an independent, ad-free monthly magazine that for more than thirty years has used words and photographs to invoke the splendor and heartache of being human. The Sun celebrates life, but not in a way that ignores its complexity ... The Sun has attempted to marry the personal and political; to honor the genuine and the spiritual; to see what kind of roommates beauty and truth can be; and to show that powerful teaching can be found in the lives of ordinary people.
In order to completely describe my approach to picturing, about the only thing I would have to add to that statement are the words "places, and things" immediately following the phrase "ordinary people".
In any event, in the most recent issue I came across this statement which I thought might be fodder for discussion:
As we increasingly connect with the world through computer screens, we're removing ourselves from direct sensory contact with nature. On other words, we're learning to substitute symbols of reality for reality itself. ~ from Computing The Cost: Nicholas Carr On How The Internet Is Rewiring Our Brains (The Sun • March 2009)
Carr goes on to state that this phenomenon "isn't something necessarily new, that it's just a continuation of what we saw with other electronic media like radio or television. But I do think it's an amplification of those trends." I would agree with that caveat (as I do with his aforementioned opinion) but me thinks he should not have limited himself to electronic media -
I mean, what is a photographic print if not a "symbol" of something from reality?
Unless one is possessed of a serious mental deficiency, there are very few who would mistake a picture of a thing for the thing itself. Obviously, no matter how you look at it, a picture of an orange is not an orange. It may conjure up feelings, emotions, and thoughts about an orange - it may even instigate a bit of salivation - but, in the end, if you actually bit into the print, that's where any illusion about it being an orange would come to an abrupt and distasteful end.
However, and this goes quite a way in explaining my POD fever, I do believe there is a difference between viewing pictures online and viewing the same pictures in a printed book. And that difference is a big part of the point of Carr's article about how the internet is rewiring our brains - the internet promotes the ability to "jump around" (hyperlinks) in a field of vast quantities of information over the ability to concentrate and be contemplative:
I guess it comes down to what you value most about human intelligence and, by extension, human culture. Do you believe that intelligence is a matter of tapping into huge amounts of information as fast as possible - being "more productive" - or do you think intelligence means stepping back from that information, thinking about it, and drawing your own conclusions in a calm thoughtful way?
From which I would extrapolate this:
I guess it comes down to what you value most about looking at pictures. Do you believe that looking at and appreciating pictures is a matter of tapping into huge amounts of pictures as fast as possible - being "more productive" in your picture viewing - or do you think appreciation, understanding, and finding meaning means stepping back from that information, thinking about it, and drawing your own conclusions in a calm thoughtful way?
FYI, I value the ability to concentrate and be contemplative when viewing pictures and, as I have mentioned previously, I find the internet to be a very poor venue for such an activity. A book, on the other hand, is a very viewing friendly object. I can not only see it, I can feel it. The pictures become things, in and of themselves, in a manner that simply is not possible on a screen.
Ink on paper is a 1000x more real to me than an image on a screen. My connection to it is warm and human. I feel that a person, an actual person, was involved in a book's making in way that does not come through with an image on a screen. A book was made from a tree, a living renewable resource. A screen is cold and impersonal.
A book just feels right.
So, when I'm in the mood to substitute a symbol of reality for reality itself, I like to take mine "real".
Reader Comments (3)
The quote from The Sun is a philosophical can of worms about which past thinkers of consumed reams of paper and barrels of ink. While it is certainly true that the computer substitutes symbols of nature for nature itself, it is not quite as clear that the use of our senses or the epistemological frameworks through which we interpret their data does not also constitute a substitution of a symbol for the thing in itself. But this is old news well documented by Kant in his writing about the Noumenon and just about every other thinker since. It's a hard nut to crack, and I get the sense that you prefer to discard it with the common sense argument, (i.e. Unless one is possessed of a serious mental deficiency...), which in practical terms seems fine, but is somewhat unsatisfying because the history of common sense is a history of convention confused with truth. After all, it wasn't that long ago when people would argue that you were possessed of a mental deficiency if you couldn't see that the sun circles the earth.
Regarding your main point, I find that the print arrests my attention, but not necessarily the printed book page. When I'm in front of a good print, I just want to stare are it and absorb everything I can from it basking in its glow, while the book encourages me to flip the page quicker than the image often deserves because of the promise of something new and exciting on the next page. I haven't made up my mind on images on the internet; sometimes I will really take my time with a good image on a website, other times I'm already onto the next thing before the image has fully loaded. One thing is certain: they are all different media and as such each begs for a different approach from both the photographer and viewer.
I think the whole notion of symbols vs the thing itself is a big part of learning to take pictures in the first place. From an early age we learn how to substitute the symbol of the thing for the actual thing in front of us. So we know what a chair, or an orange, or a car, or a house look like, without often thinking or paying real attention to the specific chair, or actual orange, or real car that we are looking at.
The shorthand symbols become how we think about things (maybe a touch of Platonic forms in there too) and I think many people think that way when they start taking pictures too. It seems to take a while to start learning to look at what is actually there in front of you, rather than the symbols. Learning or re-learning to draw is a bit like that too - most people draw at a level around 12 years old, when most people stopped trying to draw. So it is all two dimensional symbols in place of really drawing what's in front of them.
Typical landscape photography might well be similar, in that the search is always on to extract that ideal, unrealistic form of 'what the landscape should look like' in the photographer's head. Abstracting away complexity, cropping out things that 'dont fit', waiting for ideal, perfect, totally non-typical lighting. Collapsing it all down to what the symbol for 'idyllic landscape' looks like and trying to capture that.
Some universities are moving away from real textbooks, in favour of online or laptop versions. I have similar problems with that - reading on a screen, like looking at photos on a screen, just isn't the same thing.
I wonder if we imprint on a medium based on our first moving experiences. I saw decent reproductions in books and Aperture long before I saw the original prints for those same images. While I have learned to really enjoy original prints, I love good reproductions. I even spent my career in the printing and publishing industry—because I was so taken by the combination of the reproduction and the image itself.
OTOH, even boomers like me (us I think) have been bombarded with visual imagery from the earliest age.