urban ku # 32 - what might Mr. Jones think?

Window ice • click on photo to embiggen itIn his book, Photography: A Very Short Introduction, Steve Edwards gives an ever so brief afterword-nod to digital photography. It's a very brief, new-day's-a-comin' kind of thing in which he raises a few questions and suggests a few implications about the future of photography in the digital age.

But, the one "issue" he barely addresses is the one that interests me the most - the means of making digital photographs has been placed in the hands of every Tom, Dick and Harriet on the planet (or seemingly so). I don't think that it's a stretch to say that more photographs (1.5 zillion more?) are being made now than in any time in photographic history.

Hell, in my own house, there are now 4 digitally equipped "shooters". The wife, who was the recipient of my largesse (in the form of her first ever digitial camera) at Xmas, has probably taken more photographs since the first of the year than she has over the past 10 years. Then there's the college boy, the senior-itis girl and even little Hugo has his own digital camera (real, not a toy) and flickr site.

Pictures, pictures, everywhere.

My interest in this phenomena is simple - why? What's the deal? What is the fascination with taking pictures? Is there something in the human psyche that cries out for real-time verification of one's self and one's surroundings?

Or is it that living in a media/image saturated culture develops in one the need to be seen (literally and figuratively) as part of the media?

With all of the hoopla surrounding the truth/not truth issue regarding photography, it almost seems that for many, if not most, nothing is real unless it's photographed - see, I really was there, I really did that, that's really me. And all of this is not reserved for after-the-fact memories, it's real-time - take a picture and everyone rushes to see it on the LCD. Take a picture of Mt. Rushmore and everyone wants to immediately see the picture of it even though they're standing right in front of it.

I find it a bit weird when someone takes a photo of little Hugo and then, when viewing the LCD image mere moments later, states, "Isn't he so cute." Again, it is almost that his precence isn't enough to establish his cute-quotient, it needs to be documented.

And there's that word again - documented. Most of the shooters I am talking about are making documents not pictures.

Nevertheless, it all causes me to think that -

...Something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Featured Comment: Sean wrote; "surely the main issue is to what degree the digital can still be regarded as photography (writing with light)... how much alteration can occur before the image is mere illustration (synthetic) rather than photograph?"

publisher's response: We're still "writing with light", but the light-sensitive substrate/material, which is still enclosed in a light-tight box behind a lens, is different. As for illustration v photograph, certainly the techniques with which one can manipulate an image are much more accessible and easier/faster to use, but...as a film-based example, are Jerry Uelsmann's photographs still photographs?

Featured Comment: Ana wrote; "I think it goes right back to the every photo is a death thing --a lot of the desire to photograph is the desire to fix history. In the normal course of events the photograph can be expected to outlast the moment and even ourselves and I think a lot of the impetus behind rushing to view the photo that was just taken is this awareness that 'this is what will be remembered'."

urban ku # 31 - document and picture

Dark threatening sky over white snow #2,. • click on photo to embiggen itIn Photography, A Very Short Introduction (here we go again), Steve Edwards basically divides photography into categories - documents (not to be confused with documentary) and pictures.

At its inception, photography was deemed to produce documents, i.e., purely objective, mechanical copies of actual/real people, places and things. These documents were not deemed to be pictures, i.e., work that displayed evidence of intellect used in the creation of "idealized forms".

Hence, this notion - "Banality can ... be employed as a device for stretching the viewer's attention - for renewing art in a distracted age; similarly, some artists use(d) the plain document as a counter-weight to the spectacular values of the mass media ... The continued exploration of everyday life in photography usually retains the rhetoric of the document to reveal the overlooked and the ordinary .. [s]ometimes these things attain a strange beauty, at others their very ordinariness is stressed; in some instances, the seemngly trivial details of life take on a transcendent or quasi-spiritual quality ..."

Of course, today (and in the past - Strand and Evans as examples) many photographers use the rhetoric of the document to create pictures.

Just in case you couldn't tell from viewing my photographs, I like this notion very much.

urban ku # 30 ~ 2 myths about photography

Dark sky over white snow • click on photo to embiggen itThe artist Jeff Wall said that there are two prominent myths about photography: the myth that it tells the truth and the myth that it doesn't.

I like this notion very much.

Steve Edwards (from Photography: A Very Short Introduction) has this to say about that: "...the most productive way to view photographs is to hang on to the contradiction or tension between the two myths; to pay attention to the pro-filmic moment and the form imposed upon it by the photographer and his or her apparatus ... [w]hile photographs are copies of their pro-filmic moment, they are never unmediated copies of it ... [p]hotography is then a double or paradoxical form ... a transcription of a bit of the world and, at the same time, a picture shaped by the determinents of the apparatus and the choices made by the photographer. Maintaining this double focus (ed. - the viewer's awareness of two myths) requires effort and attention; failing to do so gets the viewer caught up in all sorts of probelms."

I like this notion very much as well.

Featured Comment: Mary Dennis wrote (in part); "... what the heck is a "pro-filmic moment?" Is it related to the decisive moment? ;-) I'm just as smart as the next person (at least I think I am...) but the older I get the less patient I become with gobbledygook language. Maybe I'm just regressing. Or need a new de-coder ring..."

Featured Comment: Tom Gallione wrote (in part); "...Souriau, a French “Filmologist,” introduced and defined these terms as part of a terminology to study film: the “filmic” being everything that appears in the film, and the profilmic everything that exists in reality that receives a special destination in the film (like actors, props, decors) and leaves its traces on the celluloid ..."

publisher's comment: ...now, now, people. If the academics of the world write so that just anyone can understand it at a glance, they'd be out of a job. I am also beginning to think that the jargonese - which, in most cases, does have precise meaning for those who are "educated" - is an attempt to add a scientific luster/legitimacy to an essentially un-scientific field - art criticism.

PS - on the other hand, doesn't your daily bread taste that much sweeter when you have to earn it yourself with a little hard work? The stuff that gets spoon-fed to you is usually kind of mushy and bland.

ku ~ a brief "batty" history

Well, well, well. Scratch my back with a hacksaw. I have always believed that there is very little new under the sun, but thank you, Peter Henry Emerson (courtesy of Steve Edwards and his book Photography: A Very Short Introduction) for making it perfectly clear.

Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936) is considered by many photo historians to have made a greater impression on Victorian photography than any of his contemporaries. His photography and ideas about photography succeeded in laying down the foundations of a new, unsentimental type of work, and laying the groundwork for the Photo-Secession movement. Heavy stuff, that.

Emerson's big idea at the time was "Naturalistic Photography" - his main claim was that one should treat photography as a legitimate art in its own right, rather than seek to imitate other art forms; imitation was not needed - it could confer its own legitimacy without it.

Emerson's feeling was that pictorialism was becoming somewhat bogged down due to sentimentalism and artificiality. At the same time, others were becoming dissatisfied with the fact that the Photographic Society had become too concerned with scientific rather than with artistic aspects of photography.

Emerson urged that photographic students should look at nature rather than paintings, that one should look at the range-finder or focusing screen and see what kind of pictures this created. He felt every student should "..try to produce one picture of his own...which shall show the author has something to say and knows how to say it; that is something to have accomplished..."

Sound familiar?

Emerson also argued that a photographer should imitate the eye. He claimed that one only sees sharpness in the centre, and that the image is slightly blurred at the periphery, and therefore suggested that one should make a photograph slightly out of focus in order to achieve that effect, merely ensuring that the image in the centre is sharp. In his book he wrote: "Nothing in nature has a hard outline, but everything is seen against something else, and its outlines fade gently into something else, often so subtly that you cannot quite distinguish where one ends and the other begins. In this mingled decision and indecision, this lost and found, lies all the charm and mystery of nature."

Had a good look at my photographs lately?

In Photography: A Very Short Introduction, Edwards states (regarding this imitate-the-eye approach to photography) that "'[i]t ought to be apparent that Emerson's attempt to model the photograph on a particular conception of the retinal image was quite batty (though, it is no worse a a picture for that). Interestingly enough, it is this very approach that I take to my photography that also drives most camera-clubbers batty. It also drove many of Emerson's peers rather batty as well.

And, for the NPNers in the room, Emerson was not the easiest of people to get on with, and was inclined ... to make sarcastic and vitriolic remarks...

Sound like (ocassionally) somebody you know?

PS - I have finished Photography: A Very Short Introduction. It's an easy, informative and thought-provoking read and, for the most part, avoids any protracted dips into academic obtuseness. Consequently, I am upgrading my previous Must Read Alert to a MUST READ MUST READ - that's a rare double-dog MUST READ alert for this book. I will be bloviating on various ideas and issues raised in the book for quite awhile.

Featured Comment: Paul Maxim wrote (in part); "... the stuff about "imitating the eye" (Emerson) is unadulterated nonsense. The eye may, in fact, see that way (in much the same way that it "sees" things upside down), but the brain doesn't interpret the image that way. It fills things in. Even if the outer regions of the "picture" in reality are out of focus, the brain (and you) sees everything in focus. Saying that a photograph that's fuzzy on the edges and includes very obvious vignetting is "more like we really see" is simply not true...."

Featured Comment: Steve Lawler wrote (in part); "Add me to the Emerson camp. The thing that struck me while following this thread is that in many respects we're discussing the difference between "looking" and "seeing," between the physical capabilities of the organism and the image we "feel." ... Photographic technology of allows us to create sharper images than ever before, yet more often than not, I prefer the impressionistic approach..."

publisher's comment: Mary D., you're totally freaking me out.

urban ku # 29 ~ late afternoon backyards

Late afternoon backyards with snow • click on photo to embiggen itLooking out of my office/studio window. Who knows? Maybe there's even a sink buried in the snow. Even though it's not featured, I hope somebody takes a look and leaves a comment nevertheless.

Now that I think about it, I'm certain there's kitchen sink in there. Click to enlarge and spend a lot of time looking at it.

Featured Comment: Kent Wiley wrote; "I SEE IT!"

ku # 461 - Ansel Adams: A Renaissance Relic

-10F on the Saranac River #3 • click on photo to embiggen itI have received my copy of Photography: A Very Short Introduction by Steve Edwards (Oxford University Press). Some might not consider a 160 page book (full of words and very few photographs) to be a "very short" introduction, but, 28 pages into it, I'm going to issue a MUST READ alert. If you're "serious" about photography, get it, read it.

One interesting tidbit that has already captured my interest is this passage; "The art-photographer Ansel Adams criticized what is probably the most famous documentary project, the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration, which produced 270,000 photographs of American society between 1935 and 1943. Adams claimed that those working for the FSA (including, Arthur Rosthstein, Dorthea Lange, and Walker Evans) were 'not photographers' but 'a bunch of sociologists with cameras'."

Now I know that Adams came around, much later in life, to appreciate some of the photography of the so-called New Togographic photographers, but this statement by Adams puts him ever so firmly in the camp of modern Romanticist/Sentimentalist landscape photographers. As I have mentioned before, I appreciate Adams' photography within the cultural and photographic paradigms during which it was created. His Zone System was truly revolutionary and the prints which he created with it are things of undeniable idealized beauty, but...

IMO, the Zone System, was a pictorialist technique which, in its own way, was little different from the early pictorialist techniques that the f64 Group (of which he was a card-carrying member) distained and "revolted" against. It was his way of subjectizing his referent, consciously and deliberately arting it up, if you will. As Steve Edwards makes clear, as far back as the 15th century, Renaissance artists were taking great pains to "infuse their work with the explicit signs of mental effort ... the creation of idealized figures that were not copies of imperfect nature ...."

Adams was certainly mining/honoring a time-honored tradition of the art world - the distain for "mere" objective (a problematic word) documentation - the artisanal, and the embrace of broad, generalized and idealized forms = Art. To put it another way, Edwards opined; "Art was characterized by its distance from the contingent features of the actual world and in this way signified the presence of an active intelligence." (arting it up).

Which is yet another way of saying, detail (literally) = documentation/copying (lowly artsanal trade/work), whereas, mental labor employed in creating "broad and general effects and idealized forms" = art (noble and of the highest pretensions).

BTW, all of these distinctions of what-is/is-not-art were codified by academia as early as 1648 with the establishment of tha Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris, followed by the Royal Academy in London in 1768. Nice to know that some things never change.

In any event, back to Adams. I like Adams' photography much like I like my collection of bake-o-lite radios - very interesting relics from a bygone era, which have little or no relevence (other than historic precedent) to what's happening now. As objects, I think both possess incredible and timeless beauty.

The real pity is that, for the masses, broadcast music devices (and even the notion of "broadcast") have undergone tremendous changes while photography, for the masses and the "serious" amateur, has essentially remained rooted in a paradigm that is centuries old - the need to create photographs of idealized forms and infuse them with explicit signs of mental/technical effort.

Although, it's interesting to note that much of academia, while elevating the "signs of mental effort" almost to fetishistic proportions, has nevertheless rejected traditional notions of "idealized forms".

Snow storm Saranac Lake style - Aaron, aka, Hugo's dad

Saranac Lake snow storm • click on photo to embiggen itI received a few photos from Aaron this AM. I put these 2 together just to show another view of yesterday's storm.

The fence gate butts right up to the street in Aaron's front yard. Anybody want to venture a guess about how many times he had to shovel it out after the plow went by? There was a bit of frustration involved which explains why he titled the photograph, "screwthatimgoingbacktobed.jpg".

FYI

Mary Dennis wrote; "It appears your blog is being widely read Mark.

Mary - here's a 1 page (of 5) of my Recent Visitor Map. My typical weekly stats show (on average) 3,000 pages views by 1,600 unique visitors (850 first-time visitors, 750 returning visitors). I think this pretty good for a newbie on the blog block.

Thanks to everyone for your support. Even though I sometimes like to hear myself talk, I wouldn't be doing this without you.