man & nature # 16 ~ how deep can you go?

End of a rainy day • clikck to embiggen"There is a difference between looking at photographs--which has become a common cultural practice in connection with reading newspapers--or seeing the image. The latter refers to reconstructing the photograph by exploring the deep structure of the image--which involves the application of practical knowledge and creative insights and relies on the cultural or historical consciousness of the reader. Looking is the visual routine of readers, seeing is the visual practice of the literate."~ Hanno Hardt

Hmmmm ... "the literate".

What's in it for you? Are you into "exploring the deep structure of the image"? Do you understand your own "cultural or historical consciousness"? Can you even have a "creative insight" regarding a photograph without being aware of and understanding them?

And, other than yourself, who are you making pictures for? The literate or the looker?

Just a few questions that have come to mind. Any answers?

man & nature # 19 ~ reading a photograph

Meacham Lake beach • click to embiggenGetting back to things photographic as opposed to social commentary rants and bloggeritis, I thought that this statement from Joel Meyerowitz was interesting and informative:

I find it strangely beautiful that the camera with its inherent clarity of object and detail can produce images that in spite of themselves offer possibilities to be more than they are ... a photograph of nothing very important at all, nothing but an intuition, a response, a twitch from the photographer’s experience.

This picture of Meacham Lake beach, part of Meacham Lake State Park, is a "photograph of nothing very important" - a lifeguard on his perch, a sandy beach, a single boat, a few bathers, the sky, and receding mountains is at first glance not that unusual or unique. You've probably seen something like it before. These elements are essentially Barthes' studium - about which he states:

The studium is a "kind of education (civility, politeness) that allows discovery of the operator." It is the order of liking, not loving. News photographs are often simple banal, unary photos which exemplify studium because "I glance through them, I don't recall them; no detail ever interrupts my reading: I am interested in them (as I am interested in the world), I do not love them."

Yet, "in spite of itself offer possibilities to be more than it is". Therein is the potential for Barthes' punctum - "that accident which pricks, bruises me ... These are the photos which take our breath away for some reason that was completely unintended by the photographer"

Regarding punctum, Barthes also states that:

Sometimes, the punctum reveals itself after the fact, as a function of memory ... It is a testament to the pensiveness of a photograph ... This pensiveness is the strength of a photograph. The pensiveness is, again, a political element of photography. While most photographs offer only the identity of an object, those that project a punctum potentially offer the truth of the subject. They offer "the impossible science of the unique being."

True to Barthes notion of "completely unintended by the photographer", the punctum of the Meacham Lake beach picture, which I "discovered" after the fact was not in my mind as I made this picture - I was merely practicing the art of not thinking without falling asleep. I was picturing, as Meyerowitz suggests, with only "an intuition, a response, a twitch from the photographer’s (my) experience", aka, my state of ku.

The after-the-fact punctum which pricked me was the realization - after viewing the picture for an extended length of time - that I had pictured a "truth of the subject". That truth of the subject is simply this - the Adirondack region, outside of a few villages, is a vast empty place. A place that is tread upon very lightly by the hand of man because, by deliberate decisions and political actions, it is protected by the NY State Constitution as "forever wild".

Take note of the distant forested shoreline - public land - that is devoid of human development. Notice the absence of motorized watercraft, and by association, the quiet that pervades the scene. By connotation, compare that to more "civilized" waterfront vacation locations at the height of the summer season. And, guess, what - no cell phone coverage either. Almost unbelievably, all of this "impossible science" of "unique being" is within a few hours drive of the enormous population of the megalopolis of NE US of A.

Perhaps this punctum pricks only me because I know the "story". Perhaps to most it is just a picture of nothing very important. But that particular punctum causes me to think that this picture just might be the best picture I have ever made that captures a unique sense of place of the place in which I live.

A sense of place that depicts why I love it so deep in my bones.

picture window # 15 ~ the big grey dog is rolling ...

2 fer 1 • click to embiggenThere seems to be a blog virus that's an intrinsic (and some might say, inevitable) component of blogging - the need to stuff it all after a protracted period of involvement. A number of blog notables - Alec Soth being the most obvious example, Tim Atherton being a lesser one - just decide, seemingly all of a sudden, to just quit. Soth with notice, Atherton without. Even Mike J. over on T.O.P. recently posted a "Gone Fishin'" entry and announced he was depending on guest contributers (for a while) for content.

Without a doubt, there is a kind of blogging "fatigue" that can set in. I know the feeling. As Carl Perkins, George Thorogood, and others have sung:

Well, I walked up to the window
And I said gimme a ticket please
She said where to mister
I said that's alright by me
I'm just restless
I got to get on out of town ...

Run this greyhound far as it will go
Drop this country boy a little farther down the road
I'm just restless
I got to get on out of town ...

Continuing with the big grey dog metaphor, I feel like I have to get on down the road a piece. Not that I am going to abandon my hometown, The Landscapist (remember, it's a meteaphor). I plan to keep on keeping on with that, but, as luck / fate / karma would have it, I have received an offer to be a beta member / tester of a new print on demand magazine service. I find this to be a very exciting prospect.

Part of the reason that I am restless, re: blogging, is that it is such a virtual thing - hey, if SquareSpace has a server, software, virus seizure, just like the turkey in A Christmas Story, it's gone, all gone. Then there's the fact that photographs are best viewed as printed pieces, not as virtual representations on a computer monitor where they all tend to look (a)like ... well ... a picture on a computer monitor.

The other "problem" with blogging is that on The Landscapist - and many other photo blogs as well - there is a wealth of valuable stuff buried in "archives" (past entries) that, for the most part, might just as well be buried six feet under for all the viewing that they get. I mean, I save lots of photo pubs, not to mention my photo book collection, that I revisit and savor over and over like old friends. Can't say I've ever done that on a photo blog, The Landscapist included.

No, the web is far less than it's cracked up to be in so many ways. It's great for a "quick fix" but has very little to offer in the way of "longevity". My rule of thumb for "savor", for "longevity", for "satisfaction" is rather simple - if I can't lay in bed or sit on the can with it, it's just a passing fancy kind of thing.

So, get ready for The Landscapist, the magazine.

That said, I am putting out a call for portfolios (of the virtual kind) for review. I would appreciate it if those of you with photo blogs would link to this entry on your blog in order to get the request for portfolios out there as wide-spread as possible. I am not looking for bleeding edge, next big thing stuff - that's OK if you've got it, but I am much more interested in work that is ... well ... kind of "quiet" and low-key. I am growing weary of pretentious, deliberately "arty" pictures.

BTW, all manner and genre of work is accepted - landscape, street, people, nature, still life, bw/color, "straight", "staged", etc.

I am also putting out a call for writing contributors - regular or occasional. I know this is an intimidating prospect for many but I'm not looking for academic treatise or mind-shattering / groundbreaking thoughts and ideas. Simple thoughts, notions, and ideas about photography from a personal perspective is what I'd like. As a matter of fact, simple writing that is free of camera-club speak and as anti- academic lunatic fringe as possible.

FYI, the magazine will probably be a quarterly publication, or, depending upon the number of submissions, whenever there is enough to say. The emphasis will be on pictures, not words - think LensWork (download a pdf sample) but with even fewer words.

If this is to work, I need your help even if it is in just a "small" way.

ku # 529 ~ the vultures come home to roost in Shangri La

Turkey vulture (buzzard) • click to embiggenI assume that most of you understood my 4th of July upside down flag intentions. As Aaron correctly pointed out (in answer to a question about it), a US flag flown upside down is a signal of distress. This is the second year running that I have posted an upside down flag image on July 4th. IMO, if there had been blogging 30 years ago, I could have been doing it every year since then.

CAVEAT: this entry is actually about photography's ability to illustrate and illuminate the real and the truth - although that may not be clear until you reach the end of the entry.

I don't know how many of you took the time to read the linked article on the July 4th post. As Kent opined, it's "A scary, theoretical piece ...", which is true enough. The piece does lean heavily on political and economic theory - something that most Americans have little time to consider as they go about living their merry disillusions.

Nevertheless, all that theoretical rumination has a living, breathing, practical, everyday-life side. I've seen it coming for over 30 years or more. You can read about it in Part 2 of the (UK) Telegraph piece, America and China: The Eagle and the Dragon Part two: Requiem for a dream.

IMO, the most pertinent point of the article is as follows:

Once symbolic of optimism and certainty, America's credit-crunched suburbs may be facing a decline as dramatic as that of Detroit, itself once a beacon of industry ... America took all of its postwar wealth and invested it in a living arrangement that has no future ... The design of our living arrangement is simply inconsistent with the energy realities of the future. But Americans are just not able to process this. If you look hard enough at America, what you discover is a shockingly infantile belief system, with two fundamental ideas that are deleterious to our future. There's a widespread belief in America that it's possible to get something for nothing, and that mentality has been very destructive to our society. The other idea that has become normative is that when you wish upon a star your dream comes true. These two things have become the basis of the new American ideology ....

Since 1993, I have been calling this "ideology" the I'm not going to pay a lot for this muffler school of life. This nomenclature comes from the mouth of George Foreman in a tv commercial for Meineke Muffler.

This statement just about sums up life in America since the Reagan years - those are the years in which most Americans come to fully believe and endorse the idea - propagated by the big-business class, aka, vultures - that living the good life meant having things, lots of things, and the cheaper those thing could be, the better.

No thought given to the idea of what not paying a lot for that muffler (tv, car, toaster, tee shirt ... or whatever) meant to the American workforce, American cities and towns, American society and culture, and, oh yeah, the global environment. No, no time for that. Everyone was too busy living The Dream. So busy, in fact, that no one noticed that The Dream was little more than a scam by the big-business class to facilitate the largest (and quickest) transfer of wealth (from the middle class to the wealthy beyond imagining class) the world has ever seen.

It may be too late but it's time to wake the fuck up America. Read Part 3 of the Telegraph series, America and China: The Eagle and the Dragon Part Three: onward and upward to see where the money you are spending to not pay a lot for that muffler is actually going (after the big-business class has taken their extremely generous pound of flesh) - the money that used to go to American workers and American cities and towns.

FYI, the thing that got me all worked up over this issue is the wonderful photography of Alec Soth that accompanies the series. Photography that illustrates and illuminates a big heaping dose of the real and the truth - if one only takes the time and makes the effort to see it.

Thanks to Jörg Colberg over on Conscientious for bringing the Telegraph series to my attention.

ku # 528 ~ that accident that pricks me

Marshy evening dew * click to embiggenWhen last we spoke in earnest, it was on the topic of "the real" and how that relates to photographs. As many of you already know, I am a firm believer in photography's ability to illustrate and illuminate much that is real and true. That said, however, this past week I came to new / expanded understanding of the real / true in pictures.

For the past 7 months, I have been viewing pictures of my new grandson, Helmut. Helmut lives across the continent in Seattle and, until a week and a half ago, we had never met face-to-face. So, via the web, I followed him in pictures as he progressed from a newborn to a 7 month-old. As I now know, the pictures certainly and accurately portrayed Helmut's visage and, from my personal experience with my other grandson, Hugo, I could intuit, with the visual aid of the pictures, a modest amount of Helmut's personality.

After spending a week with Helmut in the flesh, all of the pictures I had viewed up until that point took on adding meaning and understanding. The pictures I made of him are now rich with "detail". Pictures of Helmut are now incredibly "real and true".
Now he's real • click to embiggenNow, there is a specificity that accompanies the previous generality contained in the pictures of him. There is a heightened sense of the specifics of Helmut in addition to the general sense of "infant" or "baby".

Lest you think that this is just the babbling of an infatuated grandparent, let me point out, photography-wise, that this heightened experience is exactly what Roland Barthes was writing about in his Camera Lucida re: studium and punctum:

studium denoting the cultural, linguistic, and political interpretation of a photograph - the general, and, punctum denoting the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it - the specific.

Barthes went so far as to state:

The second and far more interesting element for the spectator is punctum. There are two kinds of punctum. The first is that which is "that accident which pricks, bruises me." It is the unintentional detail that could not not be taken, and that "fills the whole picture." Barthes says there is no rule that can be applied to the existence of studium and punctum within a photo except that "it is a matter of co-presence." These are the photos which take our breath away for some reason that was completely unintended by the photographer (or by the subject, for that matter). It is at the moment when the punctum strikes that the photograph will "annihilate itself as medium to be no longer a sign but the thing itself."

Now, I know that a picture of Helmut is not Helmut. But I also know that, especially now, the pictures are not only a true and accurate image of him but also that the feelings and emotions I experience when viewing a picture of him are as true, real, and complex as those I experience with him in the flesh.

Any questions? Thoughts? Ideas?

man & nature # 18 ~ I'm back

A speckled beauty • click to embiggenTo be honest, I haven't returned with a belly full of fish. However, I do have a smallish boat load of pictures.

I'll be back in the full-time saddle on Monday, because today is a day of rest, recuperation and, oh yeah, my birthday. So, I'll be doing some other stuff today.

FYI, I'm not getting older, I'm just getting better.

man & nature # 17 ~ gone fishin'

Fishing the Au Sable • click to embiggenAs the saying goes, no guts, no glory.

No one has stepped up to the plate to guest host The Landscapist for this week so you'll just have the archives to peruse for the time being. I'll be back next Saturday with a boat load of pictures and, hopefully, a belly full of fish.

See ya then.

civilized ku # 88 ~ give me liberty or give me a lot of stuff

July, 4, 2008 in America • click to embiggenJust a little something to think about on Independence Day.