urban ku # 192 ~ hiding in plain sight

Pershing Square / Central Cafe ~ under the bridge at Grand Central Station, NYC • click to embiggenYesterday's entry drew 4 great comments (to date) and I will take the time to deal with all of them in separate entries. But before I address Andreas Manessinger's comment and questions, I do want to mention that I am growing increasingly dependent upon your comments as a basis for my entries.

As I have mentioned previously, I have been feeling for some time now that I have said everything there is to be said regarding the medium of photography. Even ignoring the inherent grandiosity and self-delusion contained that statement, I/we have in fact covered a lot of ground here on The Landscapist. For those who have recently come on board, that may not be so obvious but even I am amazed at times at what I re-discover whenever I venture into the archives.

That said, I find myself at a place where I am more inclined to the desire of answering questions / addressing comments than I am to that of creating self-generated entries. It's not that occasional extraneous and extemporaneous events and topics in the wild and wacky world of photography don't intrude upon my said-it-all stasis. They certainly do. It's just that in the blog world, which IMO is at its best when it's a 2-way street, more and more, I keep looking for traffic coming from the opposite direction.

That said, it's on with the show and Andreas' comment from yesterday:

...I don't think that your images are complicated (or "chaotic", as someone said), much to the contrary, they are exceptionally concise, simple and elegant images about very complicated relations.

Basically it is all in your motto of "being true". You can't be true to a complex reality without making aspects of complexity a subject.

That being said, do you "know" or "plan" what your photos "are about"? As I have understood your term of "plain seeing", I get the impression that you don't, because that would be exactly the opposite of "plain", it would be filtered through a plan.

And if I'm right, do you rationalize your images later or are you content with the fact that they happen on another level, outside of verbalized communication?

my response - Andreas is right, regarding the referents found in my pictures, in as much as I do not "plan" in advance of each and every picturing activity what it is my pictures will be about. As I have stated, whenever I leave the building, I just grab my cameras and go. On occasion, I do have a general objective as to the what the specific object of my camera's gaze will be but but on most occasions I just picture whatever it is I see - as Andreas points out, my notion of "plain seeing".

That said, I do, in fact, "know" what whatever I picture "will be about" when it comes to the connoted found in my pictures. The connoted always falls under the heading of what it means to be human.

Now if that sounds like an after-the-fact "rationalization" to some, so be it. However, and in fact, that is and has been the rational, the MO, the raison d'etre for my personal picturing (as opposed to my commercial endeavors) since day one. My interest in making conventionally pleasing pictures has always been far far south of non-existent and none.

That said, and once again as I have stated before, the very word "ku with its roots in the oriental idea of "empty" or "nothingness" - is a big clue as to what is in my head when I picture. What I picture (the referent), as Andreas suggests, "happen(s) on another level, outside of verbalized communication" on a more "intuitive" or seemingly preternatural connection to the object of my camera's gaze. And, yes - emphatically so - I am very content with this process of seeing (although "comfortable" might be a better word).

My picturing is one of the ways by which I explore my connection to the world around me. It is, for me, a process of discovery and learning. After their making and upon subsequent viewing of the prints, my pictures are a source of nearly bottomless fascination for me. They become a true expression of the question, "what was I thinking?", or, more accurately, since I try not to think when picturing, "what was I feeling?".

The answer(s) to that question, more often than not, lead me to little discoveries, little epiphanies, little glimpses, into the world of the unthought known - that is to say, bringing things to the "surface" from the world of things that you "know" on an unconscious level but aren't really thinking about / dealing with. Things that help define and understand what it means to be human".

You know, something along the lines of:

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

And, BTW & FYI, I find that answers and connections to the unthought known are better accomplished from viewing pictures of "the real" than from those that are caricatures of the real.

All of that said, consider these 2 statement from 2 picture makers who tend to make rather "dense" pictures:

My photographs are not planned or composed in advance and I do not anticipate that the onlooker will share my viewpoint. However, I feel that if my photograph leaves an image on his mind--something has been accomplished. ~ Robert Frank

For me the true business of photography is to capture a bit of reality (whatever that is) on film ... if, later, the reality means something to someone else, so much the better. ~ Garry Winogrand

Now, if some think I am making after-the-fact rationalizations about my pictures, let it be said that those 2 statements represent the one which I cling to most - I offer my pictures of my acts of self-discovery, self-actualization, self-realization to the world, not as an ultimate act of narcissism but rather in the hope that my acts of exploration about what it means to be human may strike a chord with others who are on the same path.

Comments

[Juha Haataja]

As always, your views on photography provide a fresh perspective on the act of making images and on the act of viewing them later.

What I'm wondering is whether the brain in some sense can in fact handle complexity, althought the rational part of the brain may not be aware of it.

For example, perhaps the brain as a whole is able to notice the various interactions of the picture elements so that you "feel" that here is something deep, although you can't consiously know what it is.

And later you may spend hours looking at the image trying to unravel the mystery (perhaps not really a mystery) that is there, using the sequential processing capacity of the conscious brain.

[Don]

Well as usual I am a day late and a dollar short but my answer to this is I don't plan. When wifey and I head out with our cameras we just go. To me it is spontaneous, I see it I shoot it. I use to drive by so many things and say to myself "I'm going to have to shoot that someday." No more, tomorrow may never come. Last week I shot an old gas station sign from a station long gone. Sometimes I make one images and others I may make 6.