Posted by Colin
There is an old saw from the history of photography that the ‘negative is the score and the print is the performance’. This has been around for so long that photographers have absorbed it to the point that they no longer think about it. I was reminded of this saying yesterday though, when Karl referred to an earlier interview with Dan Bodner in which Dan said:
“A photo is a record of a moment that has passed, a dead moment. I don’t feel that I own the image as a photograph until I paint it as a painting. The photo itself always refers to the past. But a painting of the photo is a creation, which goes on living. The painting defines its own continuing moment in time.”
I obviously have no idea how creation works for Dan, but I wanted to point out to anybody else who followed the link that this was a very limiting way of seeing the medium. I’ve written more about this here.
You can be sure that reality didn’t look much like this photo. Or, for that matter, the rather different one that I’ve also linked in the post on my blog. No one artform has the monopoly on creation. And I think that in understanding what works for us we need to be careful not to be dismissive about what works for others.
Colin, your photograph reminds me a bit of some of Jannie Regnerus’ leaf photos (sorry no direct link to images, but here is the site.
I’m not sure how original Dan’s comment is, the one you quote. It may have been said many times before independently. I don’t care too much. I think the key is that he identifies this feeling of a photograph trapping something from the past. The link to death is a characteristic of photography, in this view, which of course a photographer can strive to escape.
Jannie Regnerus, who is also a painter and a writer, uses this “death” component of photography in a powerful way. Perhaps she has a limited way of using the medium (I suppose any particular work has limits of technique), but the limit (or constraint) is not the issue. The issue is how well it is used.
Whether or not your leaf photo (which I like a lot, by the way) looks like reality or not is not relevant to the point you raised regarding Dan. Also, Dan is not dismissive of photography, although the interview (or selected sentences) might give this impression. Dan loves photography. He doesn’t consider himself a great photographer, but he is planning to collaborate with one.
Paul discussed issues of luminosity in a previous comment in a previous post. I think your leaf photo is a good example of how photography does not have to be “about light.” The subject here is the texture of the materials, the contrast of the forms. Of course the light is necessary (as it is in viewing a sculpture), but it is not the subject. What is the dark area in the lower right side? Is that a shadow, a damp spot? Did you really want to have it there, or is it accidental? Blocking it off, I notice that it does frame the image on that side. It does have a function. I guess I do prefer it there rather than not. What do you think?
Karl,
I said a limited way of seeing the medium, not of using it. Both Dan and the photographer in the link you gave are using photography in interesting ways.
There is always a danger in taking short quotations and over analysing them, however I felt that if you were confident enough that the quote sumarised a position well enough to use it, then I out to be able to take it at face value.
Dan may love photography, but nothing that you quoted suggested that he saw it as anything other than a means to and end. That is a valid use for photos to be sure, but not their only use, and I disagree fundamentally about the suggestion that a photo is always backwards looking. I chose an illustration which used a photo as a springboard in much the same way that I understand Dan works, but my end result would still be called a photograph. Beyond this and we would just be discussing semantics (is a photo something you take, or make etc.)
Colin
Karl,
Re: the leaf
My photos are often more about shape and texture and less about light than those of others. Here is an article that I wrote a while back about the non-luminous landscape.
However, even saying that, the important decisions in finalising this photo were about how to use the light to empasise the texture.
The mark on the right is a flaw in the stone (which is a sheet of sandstone). I could have excluded it. Opinions differ as to whether I should have.
Colin
Auspicious,
You are right that it is my fault for presenting a limited view of Dan in the interview.
A photograph is always linked to a moment in time, the moment it was taken. As time passes, this moment will be always something more of the past. This is the way a camera works, so there is no escaping it completely. I think Regnerus uses this. Some painters, like de Chirico, get a similar effect with their use of shadows.
I also agree that your picture has a timeless quality to it. If connection to the past is a characteristic of a photograph, then it is an interesting challenge to break this link, and I think you have done a good job with it.
I suppose the test of this would be to look at computer generated images that have no reference to a real moment in time. Do they have this “death” characteristic? My guess is, they don’t.
Now I’m not so sure Dan would agree with you that he is using the photograph only as a means to an end. What would you say he is doing with his drawing? Is that only a means to an end? Well, then you could say the same about the painting.
I said earlier that artists (I meant “I”) sometimes consider photography threatening. I think what this discussion and that from yesterday shows is that each of us, the painters, the photographers, and the fiber artists, are a bit sensitive about our media. This would seem to be the barrier that keeps us from learning from each other — the fear that the other techniques somehow undermine the significance of our own. I don’t want to dismiss our feelings, but it would be interesting to see how to go beyond that.
Do you have an image that shows a bit more of the flaw of the sandstone on the right side?
Finally, I take a shot at the Sargent tent issue that came up yesterday, posted to that thread.
Karl,
“Do you have an image that shows a bit more of the flaw of the sandstone on the right side?”
No. I was using a camera with a 100% accurate viewfinder (these are rare). The image was composed in camera.
Colin
I am blown away by the exquisite textures and subtle colors of this picture
A photograph is always linked to a moment in time, the moment it was taken.
I’d take issue with the ‘moment’ concept.
Take a look at the work at
http://www.butzi.net/newgalleries/pacific/slowtime.htm
The exposures there vary in duration from just a few seconds (arguably a ‘moment’ still, although a darn long one) all the way out to perhaps twenty minutes, a length of time which is NOT a ‘moment’. In 20 minutes, the light changes, the tide comes in, the wind shifts direction.
Such photographs are interesting to me primarily because they reveal landscape processes which occur so slowly that they’re quite difficult to percieve without assistance of some sort of light integrating technology.
“A photograph is always linked to a moment in time, the moment it was taken.”
And then there are scanning backs where each part of the photograph is a different moment.
And composites where the same is true, but in a different way.
And photos which clearly are moments, but are made in a way to represent the subject and time in a more general way.
Colin
Birgit,
Thank you.
Colin
Karl,
here is a classical interpretation of the score and performance adage.
http://www.f45.com/html/tech/techc.html
The link was provided by a commenter on my site. I’m not familiar with this photographer’s work.
When I get some time, I’ll do you a piece based upon twin performances from that leaf photo.
Colin
Photography and painting are both ways of creating visual images. This idea of one being “living” and the other “dead” doesn’t seem to be based on anything about the mediums themselves. It’s just more of the same old romantic notions we’re used to hearing about art. It’s all very nice to romanticize the painting process, and I suppose doing so can help sell work to certain buyers, but I think overall it trivializes what we do and doesn’t really serve our interests as artists.
—
The truism that the ‘negative is the score and the print is the performance’ seems to grow out of a very conservative traditionalist view of photography. If you think of a musical score as the composer’s original intent and the performance as the musicians’ attempt to bring it to life, you’re stuck with the notion of judging the performance by how well it’s true to the composer’s intent. That’s all very nice for classical music, but it seems limiting to impose the constraint on photography.
If you’ve got a dead photographer and someone else making prints of their work, then I suppose the above could make sense. But what if the (living) photgrapher is doing his/her own printing? Whose vision are they obligated to remain true to? And what about all the things one can do, especially now w/ digital tools, to alter, transform and combine images? The negative seems less to me like a score that one is trying to perform than simply another element that one can use in a variety of different ways to create images.
David,
I don’t know exactly what Ansel Adams meant by the score/performance quote. I did read the book, but it was a long time ago.
Remembering, of course, that it is a metaphor.
What I’ve taken it to mean is that the negative becomes a fixed point. Once you have the negative you lock down certain elements of the creation. If you have photographed the rock, then you haven’t photographed the tree etc.
So there is a process of creation which leads to a negative, and then there is another process of creation that leads to a print.
Although many photographers insist on printing their own work, some do not. The photographer doesn’t have to be dead to have others print their work.
I see similarities with music, in that the performers have the score. The score exists as a fixed point. The composer locked down certain elements. The performers may be like the research based early music people who try to be true to their understanding of what the composer wanted. Or they might give a freer interpretation of the score, or they might even be jazz musicians who produce a performance only loosely connected to the original (and there my knowledge of music runs out).
In creating a print from a negative I’m not necessarily trying to be true to any existing vision. I am simply using it as a starting base for a creation. Sometimes there is an easy to follow flow from something that I thought before tripping the shutter, and sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes I’m doing jazz, sometimes I’m using modern instruments on a piece that was conceived for medieval ones, and sometimes I’m trying to fulfill an idea created at the time that the photograph was taken. What I can’t do is change the negative.
For what it is worth, digital hasn’t really changed the amount of manipulation possble, but it has made it easier. The word ‘negative’ could be replaced with the phrase ‘raw file’ throughout. Jpegs are an interesting half way house, in that the camera (or scanner) makes many of the performance decisions.
Colin
Colin, thank you, your view of the quote was much more about opening possibilities than the way I interpreted it. In the spirit that you look at it, I’m in 100% agreement with you.
Regarding digital vs. darkroom manipulation, I agree that most of the things you can do w/ a computer could have been done w/ darkroom techniques. But w/ the computer the process is much more immediate, to the extent that you can see the results of your actions in real time. It’s also cheaper, in the sense that you’re not going through so many costly materials to see your results.
“A photograph is always linked to a moment in time, the moment it was taken.”
An interesting statement, but ultimately meaningless if taken in general terms. Sure there are likely many photographs where the moment in time they were created can be linked to the image but there are also many, many images that are not linked in any meaningful way to a moment in time that they were taken.
To justify the statement one will have to provide “evidence” of the moment in time one is speaking. Take Colin’s leaf. What moment in time was that then? Well, it’s in colour, that leaves out a few million years of the past but speaking within the context of this forum there is no identifiable “moment” as far as I can tell. Certainly no definition of the word moment that cannot also be applied to a memory transferred to canvas.
If the statement actually refers to the mechanical and technological “quickness” that photography affords us for grabbing negatives as partially filled canvases then it’s the same argument as saying that speed of work ties the work to a moment. I don’t see it.
“An interesting statement, but ultimately meaningless if taken in general terms.”
Let’s take the statement in context then. We have a painter, Dan Bodner, discussing the creation of images. Relative to painting or drawing, which are processes that develop images over a potentially long period of time, and which may refer to no particular time in their subject matter, photographs are almost instantaneous in capturing light coming in the camera at that moment. I cannot think of a tighter connection to a moment in time than that.
True, Colin escapes the feeling of the moment in his leaf. This is an intentional use of photography to escape the connection to a particular moment. If there were a drop of water in the picture, and this drop of water reflected a cloudy sky, then the element of time would enter the photo more explicitly.
Yes, so it is the speed of the initial capture that ties the work to a moment in time yet so much of my work takes weeks of visiting and revisiting to create. There is also often no intent on my part to capture a particular moment. To say that a photograph is always linked to a moment in time because of the mechanics of light hitting a sensor is to bring unfair generalisation to a whole genre of art. It is also a generalisation that is not true or, at the very least, is meaningless. The question, “what moment in time is Colin’s leaf image tied to?” can only really return the answer “the moment in time that the shutter was released”. It means very little.
Then take this image:
http://www.makingimages.co.uk/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=221
The negative was captured on a photo sensor. Then weeks of work and of thinking and of changing and of trying/learning new techniques were applied to eventually create the image. Light was captured in an instant as physical fact but the image is no more tied to that small part of the creative process than it is to any other part.
A photograph is usually linked to a short moment in time, less than a second. Not always.
The picture you link to above is linked to a moment in time. A week later, the subject could have a haircut. A minute later, the wind could blow her hair into a different position.
If I were drawing this person from life, it would take at minimum five minutes to draw these details. To render then with a similar degree of detail as in the photo would require painting over a longer period of time. The subject would change in that time, if only in position.
Remeber, this discussion only makes sense considering the relative time scales of capturing information from the light in painting versus photography. The post-processing time is not the issue, I think. Or else you still need to convince me. I’m interested believe me.
There is a sense in which most photographs are linked to a moment in time.
The exceptions are Paul’s long moments, and photos taken with scanning backs which are very much not single moments.
With some genres of photography the momentness is extremely important (hence ‘the decisive moment’). However, in many areas the connection with a moment is trivial. For example I visited a particular location at least weekly for ten months in a project just ended. The photographs that I was making toward the end of that project were still fractions of a second – a particular moment – but they were also distillations of those ten months.
Post processing time is also not an irrelevance. If a photographer is using that time to perfect an initial visualisation, then it doesn’t matter whether the processing takes seconds or years. But if a photographer is creating something new from the base of the negative or raw file, then the connection to any original moment weakens. Further, it is routine for photographers to combine images in processing. This may be to use pictorial elements from more than one original, but it is increasingly likely to be done to use different tonal elements from more than one original. Are these photos connected to one moment, or two, or more. Or is the momentness an irrelevance?
A photograph can be heavily tied to a particular moment, but there are significant exceptions such that there is no identifiable moment at all. And there are many types of photo where the connection is trivial, or irrelevant, or a confusing way of thinking of the resulting artwork.
“The picture you link to above is linked to a moment in time. A week later, the subject could have a haircut. A minute later, the wind could blow her hair into a different position.”
Interesting you should say that. Much of that hair, bottom right quarter, is from another photograph. Same girl, different hair growth, combing etc. I clearly failed in my attempt at subtle integration as your subconscious picked up on “hair”.
John,
I am fascinated by what you are doing. I will look more carefully at your pictures. I looked quickly before in order to reply to your comment.
-K