Art & Perception

I am travelling in New England engaged in my two great passions, dance and photography. I have announced to the dance world that I am preparing a book of my contra dance photography. Nothing like going public with an idea to force one to actually proceed with it.

Here is one of the conundrums with which I am faced, and it goes to the heart of photography as both a descriptive and an abstracting medium. At dinner last night, David Millstone challenged me about what I wanted this book project to represent. Is it about the contra dance world, or is it about photography of contra dance? Is it a narrative description of a subculture I happen to belong to, or is it a series of solutions to finding resolved images in a complex, dynamic environment?

Mostly I come to dance, because it feeds my soul and my bliss. Because dancing is so close to my heart, it is a natural subject to turn my photographic attention toward. I know the feeling of dance, and the creative challenge is to make work that also has that feeling present. But I’m also responding to light and shadow, movement and expresion, all those things that can make an interesting photograph. I stand back, and I want to work with what I’m seeing.

This challenge speaks to one of the great paradoxes of photography as a creative, interactive process. Our source material is the external world. We take a picture, which has a complex cascade of metaphoric and literal meanings and implications. Take it where? Take it from what, or whom? It implies a duality, there’s the photographer, then there’s the thing that the photograph is taken of, or from, if you wish to include the soul-snatching metaphor. Relationally, it brings forth the conflict of choosing between being a witness or a participant.

To master the photographic process requires a fluency in the sequence of chemical, or now, electronic processes that create an object with its own presence and reality. The photograph resembles something that we understand as a document of a given moment and place, but it is nonetheless a highly abstracted artifact of a lot of technology. My jollies come from being able to see from one end to the other of that tunnel of process at the very moment I am engaged in the intitial framing and exposure. And I choose to play with that process in a really complicated environment, a contra dance floor.

My resolution to the duality conflict—am I a participant or a witness?—is to not resolve it. I flit back and forth. When I want a break from dancing, I take pictures. If it’s a dance where I think bodily harm can be avoided, I’ll dance with the camera. I want those stances to be as close to each other as I can manage. I want both aspects to be present in the work.

I expect much of my job for the next few months will be figuring out just what form this project is going to take.

Do you see this as
Near completion?
Destruction?
This was a color photograph from northern Michigan. Inspired by the black and white photographs recently shown here, I converted it into lab color, clicked on lightness and then converted it to grey scale. Intrigued by Colin’s luscious blacks, I used the merge tool to increase the contrast a little to get a little more black. What else should I do or have done in my first attempt at processing black and white photos?

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Larger version

In a recent post, Hanneke showed us a beautiful pencil drawing of three pears. In the comments, she and Karl expressed interest in comparing this drawing with a photograph. I decided to experiment along these lines, and above I’ve posted a first result (click on the image for a larger view). I plan to vary a number of factors involved in creating the image; you can help me decide what would be interesting to try.

In this first effort, I used one of Hanneke’s tricks: a dark background. The pears were ones I happened to have in the house, and are different from Hanneke’s, not as nice in shape. I used a similar arrangement to hers, with natural illumination from a nearby window. I’m not thrilled with my composition, but I didn’t take much time, and I can do a better job when I come back to this. Please give me your thoughts on things you like or don’t like about the composition.

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Thanks to my New Years resolutions, I took my camera on my walk this morning. Making photos every day — what’s the big deal? Photography is just a matter of pressing a button, right?

I did the same walk around the harbor that I do every day when I am in Wilhelmshaven. But today I felt exhausted afterwards, and it wasn’t from the physical weight of the camera. I felt tired because I used my out-of-shape “photographic vision,” a special way of looking at the world through a camera. It took about half an hour of walking and shooting to get into “photographic vision,” and it now persists for some time after I put down the camera. “Photographic vision” lets me take photographs without using a camera, in a sense. I assume all the photographers have this; probably the professionals live with it all the time. For an amateur like me, it yields a sort of “mental muscle ache,” something like what you feel when you first start exercising muscles that you didn’t realize you had. All the more reason for the daily workout!

When I made the transition to digital, I thought, oh, this is just another tool to make an image, it’s not going to change anything. Boy, was I wrong. There are a lot of details I could get sidetracked on here, but suffice to say that, 2 years on, I am still in the readjustment phase that this technology is having on both my commercial work and my personal sensibility.

Digital is a big watershed shift in how photographic images come to be. But there are less portentous choices. The issue at hand is, how do you tell the difference between a tool that meaningfully adds a voice, and one that’s a fad? Photography is full of examples of process overtaking content, and it’s a common problem in advertising work. Remember how dreadful all those composited images looked when that first became possible? In the commercial realm, there are always the “instant art” solutions that one practitioner raises to a high level, then everyone copies it. Anyone remember the Hosemaster Lighting System that was so cool looking in 1988, and so overdone by 1992? The current craze is the “Lensbaby” aesthetic, which is, at last, raising a backlash: read this great rant that I came across the other day. In the fine art photography field, infrared seems to raise its grainy, overexposed head every few years, and everyone seems to be perpetually rediscovering the Holga (nee Diana) camera look.

This is why it is really useful to restrict one’s palette. I have a fair bit of equipment, because I’ve been a pro for awhile, but I don’t buy gear very often. And when I hit on a system that works, I’m loathe to change it. When I shot film I shot one kind for color, and one kind for black and white. Now 90% of my photos I take with one camera body and one lens (well, it’s a zoom, but still), and I rarely play around with alternate ways of processing my images. It’s hard in the digital realm though, because you barely get to learn how to do what you do before someone rewrites the software on you.

I am hard pressed to think of a memorable body of work that doesn’t have a consistency in execution, but that doesn’t also have a meaning that transcends those tools. Their marks have meaning. Ansel Adams applied his technical precision at the service of what, at the time, was a revolutionary way of seeing the American landscape. Cartier-Bresson used a the handheld camera, making work meant to be experienced on the printed page and eschewing a finished print aesthetic (Ever see his original prints? They’re dreadful! They weren’t the point.). Early in his career Emmit Gowin used a lens that didn’t cover the field of his 8×10 back for his inimitable family imagery. Richard Avedon took the white backdrop to a height that has yet to be matched.

Beware of copying the tricks of a master. It may be a good pedagogical exercise, but it’s unlikely to lead you to your unique voice, the mark you make your own. More likely, you’ve come across your latest reiteration of the Lensbaby.

Possible points of interest in posts and comments:
(1) Information on artistic methods applicable to several disciplines
(2) Practical aspects – framing pictures, book keeping, time keeping
(3) Creative process in art
(4) Art history
(5) Other interests

Please feel free to criticize and add other interests. We can continue discussing them in future.

I am interested in motion in a 3-dimensional context (5). My photograph barely captures the sharp drop-off to the lake and there is no motion to speak of. How can this landscape be imaged in a more interesting way? Would it help to change the medium?
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