man & nature # 126 ~ Spring has sprung # 11

Parking lot landscaping • click to embiggenFrom the same source as mentioned in the preceding entry, comes an interesting - in my mind - notion about the classic "dualism that haunts photography" (objective truth v. subjective experience):

This vexed and often tedious argument about something called the photographic medium is now being cast as a debate between photography and the digital image. In this new opposition, what were formerly two broad and often contradictory ways of understanding photographs themselves have been parted. One view, the realist, stays attached (in a less subtle but newly zealous form) to photography; the other, what could be called the constructivist position, has been transferred to the digital.

The author, Martin Lister, goes on to develop this "opposition" with some interesting observations and ideas. More goofy inconsistent assertions on this later.

man & nature # 125 ~ Spring has sprung # 10

Spring sunlight • click to embiggenThis passage, by Allan Sekula (from Introduction to the Photographic Image in Digital Culture by Martin Lister) seems to have certain relevance for the regular goings on found here on The Landscapist:

... the hidden imperatives of photographic culture drag us in two dictory directions: towards "science" and a myth of "objective truth" on the one hand, and towards "art" and a cult of "subjective experience" on the other. This dualism haunts photography, lending a certain goofy inconsistency to most commonplace assertions about the medium.

I don't know about you but I can't seem to get through a day without making a goofy inconsistent assertion about the medium of photography.

ku # 580 ~ Spring has sprung # 9

Sunlight here and there • click to embiggenConsider this:

Photographs are evidence, after all. Not that they are to be taken at face value, necessarily, nor that they mirror the real, nor even that a photograph offers any self-evident relationship between itself and what it shows. Simply that a photograph can be material for interpretation - evidence, in that sense: to be solved, like a riddle; read and decoded, like clues left behind at the scene of a crime. Evidence of this sort, though, can conceal even as it purports to reveal, what it is evidence of. A photograph can certainly throw you off the scent ... In order to show what it is evidence of, a photograph must always point away from itself. Annette Kuhn - from the essay, Remebrance - The child I never was

man & nature # 124 ~ human "beavers" (Spring has sprung # 8)

Clipped saplings • click to embiggenJust a short bushwhack off the beaten path, revealed these clipped saplings. They were most likely clipped by an enterprising Adirondack furniture maker.

ku 579 ~ Spring has sprung # 7

A Spring thicket • click to embiggenThe Frame - one of the characteristics and problems inherent in the medium of photography.

The photographer's picture was not conceived but selected, his subjects were never truly discrete, never wholly self-contained. The edges of his film demarcated what he thought most important, but the subject he had shot was something else; it extended in four directions ... The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge - the line that separates in from out - and on the shapes that are created by it. ~ John Szarkowski - from The Photographer's Eye

In case anyone was wondering, the black frame common to all of my pictures - a nod to the wet-darkroom tradition of printing the film's clear borders - is the most obvious of my techniques that "forces a concentration on the picture edge - the line that separates in from out - and on the shapes that are created by it".

Update on Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 10:13AM by gravitas et nugalis

Featured Comment: Bill Gotz asked a very good question: "Do you find any irony in the fact that the black edge was usually included to prove that the picture was reproduced full frame, as the photographer originally took it, but that your photographs are created by cropping?"

my response: While I might vigorously protest that my pictures are NOT cropped - I see square, even if my sensor does not - the fact is that my square pictures are cropped from a rectangular image file. Since, up 'til now there were no dslrs that offered native in-camera square image files, I have been forced into using what the US military calls a field-expediency methodology to get squared away.

But, to answer your question - "Yes. Absolutely." My entire visual presentation is intended to be somewhat ironic or, at the very least, a bit of trompe l'oeil - very much intended to be a sort of backhanded slap across the face of the digital perfectionists in the photography crowd who are in hot pursuit of technically perfect but insipidly dull (content-wise) pictures.

ku # 578 ~ Spring has sprung # 6

Bare tree at marsh edge • click to embiggenThe other evening I caught one of the BBC's episodes of their Genius of Photography (broadcast on the OVATION TV here in the US of A). The title of that episode is, Document for Artists.

The basic premise of the program is that the medium of photography, which was at first thought to be little more than the making of documents, albeit visual documents, eventually became to be viewed as more than mere documentation. That pictures could contain meaning(s) - whether intended by the picture maker or not - that transcended their nominal visual information.

The pictures of Eugene Atget, which were intended to be a "mere" record of things there were about to disappear - a way of life as represented by the monuments, houses, sites, streets, stores, cafes, of his beloved Paris, were used as an example of "pure" picture documents created without artistic intent that came to be considered as high Art. Interestingly enough, it was the avant-garde photographer/artist Man Ray who brought Atget's pictures to the attention of the Art World - an endeavor carried on by his then assistant, the photographer Berenice Abbott. It was through her life-long efforts that Atget and his pictures gained international recognition.

While I toil, picture-making wise, on the influential shoulders of many of the medium's past and present giants - Evans, Callahan, Porter, Shore, Meyerowitz, to name but a few - it is the totality of the voluminous body of work that Atget created that most influences my own picturing activities.

It seems rather obvious to me that the man was just flat-out obsessed with picturing his beloved Paris if for no other reason than his desire to record what would soon be lost - a drive that most accurately reflects my own predilection for picturing my beloved Adirondacks. Heaven knows that there is much that will soon be lost here in the Adirondacks - natural-world changes that are a consequence of global warming / climate change as well as social / cultural changes, aka - the destructive forces of the second/vacation home scourge/plague on local communities and institutions.

Unlike the document-making activities of Atget (but, on a somewhat ironic note, influenced by the eventual recognition of the Art inherent in his documents), my picture making activities are also informed and influenced by a conscious awareness of their artful instrumentality - aka, my oft-stated intent to illustrate and illuminate.

All of that said, there was a line regarding the medium of photography in the aforementioned tv program that I liked very much. To the best of my recollection, it went something like this:

Document influenced by Art. Art influenced by document.

That's a good one that says much about the medium's inherent characteristics and its potential to transcend the notion that a picture is just a picture.

ku # 576/7 ~ Spring has sprung # 4/5

On a narrow trail above the West Branch of the Au Sable River • click to embiggen

The photographer was tied to the facts of things, and it was his problem to force the facts to tell the truth. John Szarkowski from The Photographers Eye

ku # 575 ~ Spring has sprung # 3

Another stump in a marsh • click to embiggenJohn Szarkowski, in his book, The Photographer's Eye, lists the detail as one of the medium's inherent characteristics about which he stated:

.... The photographer was tied to the fact of things ... he could only record it as he found it ... he could only isolated the fragment, document it, and by doing so claim for it some special significance, a meaning which went beyond simple description ... [T]he compelling clarity with which a photograph recorded the trivial suggested that the subject had never before been properly seen, that it was in fact perhaps not trivial, but filled with undiscovered meaning. - italic emphasis by me

The more I understand my attraction to picturing - both the making and viewing thereof, the more I realize that I am immensely attracted to the detail and, without a doubt, the medium of photography excels at recording with compelling clarity those details which at first glance appear to be quite trivial. As far as I am concerned, the more packed with compelling-clarity detail a picture is, the more I am attracted to it - I get no kick from visual simplicity (or very little).

But here's the thing about the detail in my pictures - at best, I pay little attention to the detail found in my pictures at the point-in-time of picturing them. My only awareness of them is as clumps / fields of details as opposed to specific / discrete / individual elements. At the point-in-time of picturing it is those clumps / fields, viewed as a whole, that I attempt to organize across the 2-dimensional surface (and within the frame) of the yet-to-be print in a pleasing manner.

This approach to picturing, that is to essentially ignore the detail specifics when picturing, is the reason why my eye, my mind, and oft times my soul are endlessly fascinated by my own pictures - even though I made them, they are filled with compelling-clarity details that I did not see at the point-in-time of picturing them but that I can discover and explore after the fact of picturing.

I find it quite amazing that I can so regularly amaze myself.

FYI, this entry is the fulfillment, at least in part, of my stated intent to discuss the following from Minor White:

When I look at pictures I have made, I have forgotten what I saw in front of the camera and respond only to what I am seeing in the photographs. ~ Minor White