Hypothesis Non Fingo

Split Screen

A fragment of thought related to "When will we cease to privilege the verbal text simply because of its words?"

Jon Cassar director and executive producer of 24 is questioned in an advertisement for Sharp AQUOS HD TV in the January 2007 WIRED. One of the questions: "Part of the show's distinctive look is its split-screen boxes. What are their functions?" The boxes energize the feel of a scene and remind viewers that the action is happening at the same time. It also reminds them of different story lines.

Photographs & Photo Realist Painting

Recently I began reading Visual Cultures of Science (edited by Luc Pauwels and published by Dartmouth College Press http://www.upne.com/1-58465-511-9.html). A discussion of image production prompted me to think about the distinction between photographs and paintings. Both present the eye with color, luminance, edge data, etc. and both present their data (ordinarily) in a two-dimensional format. So, we might ask: "How are we to speak of the differences between the two image media in a useful manner?"

One starting point for such discussion might be a comparison of snapshots with photo realist paintings derived from the subject matter of snapshots - the daily, lived life. Painter Robert Bechtle, whose work was recently featured at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), provides a strong example of photo realist work. The SFMOMA show noted: For the past 40 years, painter Robert Bechtle has focused our attention on the everyday. Working in a sun-bleached color palette and photorealist style, Bechtle gives us a quiet Americana: street-scapes, family scenes, portraits of cars. Bechtle works from photographs of familiar subjects (his family and home, for example), creating a record of a precise moment while withholding just enough detail to remain painterly. The result is an uncanny reflection of middle-class American culture.

As the set piece, here is a photograph of two young men and a car in the East Bay (basically same region of the country as the Bechtle subject), with the car and people occuying approximately the same percentage of the image area.

In a general description of the photographic process we would say that light reflected off the surfaces in front of the camera lens enters the camera and impacts the recording medium in such a way as to preserve a two-dimensional projection of the bundle of light data. We might similarly speak of the light reflecting of surfaces in front of a painter, entering the painter's eyes, and causing the painter to move a brush in a set of ways that act to reproduce the two-dimensional projection of the three-dimensional bundle of light data entering the eyes. The discussion becomes interesting when we ask what distinguishes the two representations. For any individual pair of images - one photograph and one photo realist painting - we might be able to say that one captured details more faithfully (closer to a one to one corespondence between data points in the original scene and the recording of the scene. However, it might well be the case that a well-trained painter could capture more data than a photograph made with a disposable film camera with an inexpensive, low-resolution lens. So, we cannot simply speak of correspondence of data points as a means of comparison. The SFMOMA blurb speaks of Bechtle leaving out just enough detail to remain "painterly." However, there is no specification of just what sort of detail is actually left out.

Perhaps it is here that we begin to have a means of speaking about differences. With a photograph, we have a record of the light data reflected from the original objects (subject) whose characteristics are knowable; with the painting, we do not. To be continued...

R. John's comment on Vergil

Publius Vergilius Maro is the Latin name of the author of the Aeneid. This is generally rendered as "Vergil" in English. Some centuries after the author's death in 19BCE, by some accounts, the term "virga" (meaning branch or something made from a branch such as a broom or a magic wand) became associated with the author - he was seen as a wizard of sorts by readers in the Middle Ages. From this came the variant spelling "Virgil." Both spellings are in use today. Though I did not continue an academic career in Classical literature, I do hold an Ivy League undergraduate degree in Greek & Latin literature, so I felt confident in using "Vergil" as the name of the author of the Aeneid or, while we are at it, Aeneis (the original title has a Greek format to it - Aeneidos being the genetive form from which we dervie the English form and which is often used as the title in some Latin versions.)

I am curious as to just what stimulated such vitriol in the comment.

That said, I am curious about other aspects of the comment, especially the seeming sarcasm over proper grammar and theories. I would remind the commentor that these are musings that may or may not lead to research work; they are not and are not intended to be read as if they are fully edited and peer-reviewed pieces. I would ask just which bits of grammar were so offensive; just which musings or assertions so theoretically vexing.

Finally, I do not think that my phrasing about being stricken by aspects of the writing warrants the interpretation proposed in the comment. One can have a reaction to a new idea (caused by some external stimulus) that is so exciting as to cause a physical reaction (rise in pulse rate, e.g.) or at least a raised sense of mental engagement with an idea or set of ideas.

Would not a conversation on the points of contention been a more satisfactory form of engagement?

When will we cease to privilege the verbal text simply because of its words?

In the November 4-5, 2006 issue of the Wall Street Journal facing pages present a lovely couplet of articles. The right hand page carried a piece by G. W. Bowersock on Fagles recent translation of Vergil’s Aeneid; the left hand page carried a piece by Meghan Cox Gurdon on graphic novels. The right hand piece speaks to the numerous difficulties of rendering the terse Vergilian Latin prose into 21^st century English text. The left hand piece bemoans the decline of reader ability and inclination attendant to graphic novels; though an end thought hopes that the graphic novels would lead readers to richer verbal works – a form of gateway medium!

 

 

Both pieces touch on the edges of a problem without addressing that problem. Verbal language may not be the most appropriate way to render some concepts and narratives. One might suggest that elaborate prose may be required to overcome the inherent limitations of the verbal text. It might well be that one image could supplant the numerous words required to describe a texture, a spatial relationship, a temporal relationship.

 

Recently I was listening to a recording of Homer’s Iliad. I was stricken by how many lines were required to describe the look of one hero in a combat – size, visage, nature of armament and protection; then to go on and do the same for the other combatant. Then more words were required to describe their physical relationship, their places on a Cartesian grid of the landscape. Then, perhaps most strikingly, words describing the hurling of a spear and describing its ark and whether or not it met its mark had to be followed by another set of words describing the reaction of the second combatant. That is, the verbal descriptions of simultaneous actions could not be presented simultaneously!

 

Yes, there are lovely words that attempt to regain the simultaneity, to put the readers mind back in time, but there is no way around the linearity of language – the two descriptions cannot be given together. Yet, a graphical piece with limited words – even if they happen to be presented in “thought bubbles” – could present the simultaneity.

 

The difficulties of describing some aspects of life with words should not be mistaken for some form of quality of representation. The greater effort of decoding and reconstructing should not, in and of itself, be taken as a sign of higher quality or inherent superiority of a medium. This is not to say that the graphical medium is necessarily superior either. However, we might do well to think of the degree to which any particular medium or set of media might best represent a set of concepts.

 

The piece on the Aeneid makes specific mention of  a line that has posed difficulties for numerous translators because it is not clear just is being spoken of or what is being impacted. Perhaps if Vergil had embedded graphic elements, these would be more evident.

 

We might even put this into terms of the complementary binary relation between a documents structure and the meaning that any individual holds from the document. It is essentially self-evident that if a person does not read Latin (does not have the decoding ability) any meaning derived by that reader will have little to do with the story. In part this is because verbal coding is a two-stage process. Symbols that bear no one-to-one relationship with their referents must be decoded, then a set of images, relationships, and commentary have to be woven together. The symbols with closer relationships to their referents require less decoding. This does not mean that either symbol set is priviliged, only that different systems are at play and will likely have differing results with differing viewer/readers.

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Diomedes wounds Aeneas in the Trojan  War, while  Aphrodite  rushes to support her son.

Museum Collection: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, USA Catalogue Number: Boston 97.368 Beazley Archive Number: 202631 Ware: Attic Red Figure Shape: Calyx krater Painter: Name vase of the Tyszkiewicz Painter Date: ca 490 - 480 BC Period: Late Archaic

photocutionary acts - some thoughts

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Photocutionary Acts (from a draft chapter of Chauvet to flickr: Structure of Image Collections by Greisdorf & O’Connor)

While do not mean to ignore or eliminate painted images and sculpted images from our discussion of image collections, much of the discussion is centered on photographs. This photo-centricity seems warranted even simply by the numbers. There is an enormous number of people in the world making billions of photographs each year. Most of these photographs are in a digital form. 

As one focal point for some of the image collection concepts we seek to address, we have modeled, in the spirit of J. L. Austin, “photocutionary behaviors.”

Austin modeled speech acts as “illocutionary acts.” One might summarize his work by saying: “to say something is to do something.” With “photocutionary behaviors” we mean to look at the “doing of something” with photographs.

The “doing” of a photocutionary behavior holds whether one is making a quick snap shot with a point & shoot camera, using a camera built into a cell phone, or making a sophisticated studio image with equipment costing more than a small automobile. It holds whether one is making a simple recording or a highly modulated image. What is done at the time of the making of the photograph is irrelevant, as is what is done after the photograph is taken. Of course, “doing” does not necessarily stop after the image is made. Even in the case of the immediately deleted snapshot, the deletion is the doing of something, though if may well be the limiting case of what is done.

We might model photocutionary acts in the following way.

A person considers making a photograph. The purpose is irrelevant for our purposes. It might be a snapshot of a child, an elaborate advertising photo, a documentary photo of teens using drugs, or a carefully crafted cityscape.

Austin says of illocutionary acts that they are generally accomplished in order to “persuade, suggest, demand, or promise;” Pratt suggests documents are constructed in order to accomplish a similar set of goals: “motivate, articulate, educate, or felicitate.” (The information of the image / Allan D. Pratt. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1982) (Given the promise of the photograph, in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, to “retain [the subject’s] impress, and a fresh sunbeam lays this on the living nerve as if it were radiated from the breathing shape” it would seem not unreasonable to make the overt addition to these lists “remember.” This person or, in the case of some complex imaging projects, the person’s agents, must engage some instrumentality. Ordinarily this would be a camera in the ordinary sense. In some circumstances there will be lights, a selection of lenses, and post-production hardware.

The product of the photographic process is an image in some physical form. For much of the history of photography the immediate product was visible to the eye as a negative or reversal positive with subsequent operations producing tangible and manageable prints. Nowadays the images are likely to be physical only in the sense of arrangements of bits in some digital storage medium. These may be made manifest as prints, occasional viewings on the cell phone screen, closely scrutinized images on a computer monitor, large scale prints, or bits analyzed digitally with no human eyes in the process.

We might refer to the print or digital file as the “message” or, perhaps for clarity, the “photo message.” Message is used here in the sense of the substrate modulated to encode some information. In the Shannon and Weaver sense, we distinguish between the message and any meaning it might have for the photographer or for any other viewer. The message may be in a format that is interpretable by others or not; it may be in its original state or not; it may be made with production methods hospitable to subsequent uses or not. Subsequent users may include the original photographer.

Any subsequent use or interpretation of the photo message may or may not have a direct relation to the original meaning embodied in the message. The persons or objects in front of the lens may or may not be known to the subsequent user. That user may or may not be concerned that the “original” meaning of the message has not survived. The subsequent user may or may not use the image according to the message maker’s original “intent.” The secondary photocutionary behavior may often be directly related to the initial photocutionary behavior – remembering. Ten years after a child’s birthday, the pictures evoke memories; pictures of a mother when she was a child may fascinate her adult children; news photos viewed many years later remind us of the flood of thoughts at the time.

We have an initial photocutionary behavior in the construction of the photo message; we have a physically present message; we have a range of possible secondary photcutionary behaviors using the physically present message. The secondary behaviors may be conducted by the original maker of the photo message, by another familiar with the original behavior, or by someone with no knowledge or particular interest in the original photocutionary behavior.

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surrealist qualities of ultra-high resolution photographs

For some time I have been thinking about the surrealist qualities of ordinary snapshot photographs. Recently I have been examining ultra-high resolution photographs, particularly the building and landscape images made by Ben Blackwell, Principal Photographer at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. These thoughts are meant to stimulate discussion on the nature of photographic documents and the ways in which new photographic modalities may influence the nature of engagement with photos.

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For Surrealists, photographs were full of meanings that resulted from the intersection of unexpected happenings, and the artist’s objective was to stimulate the emotions with the element of surprise.

Weston Naef. The J. Paul Getty Museum Handbook of the Photographs Collections, p. 188

Kertesz called himself a “naturalist Surrealist” because of his skill at recording a scene as he found it.

Weston Naef. The J. Paul Getty Museum Handbook of the Photographs Collections, p. 173

The removal of an everyday object from its expected context was a favorite strategy of the Surrealist art practiced by Rene Magritte.

Weston Naef. The J. Paul Getty Museum Handbook of the Photographs Collections, p. 153

Breton describes Surrealism, in part, as: …transmutation of those two seemingly contradictory states, dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, of surreality, so to speak.

Andre Breton, “What is Surrealism?” lecture given in 1934

Surrealism as a movement sought to break down the distinction between the rational and trained engagements with ideas and the world and other modes of engagement; it sought integration of more ways of modeling human relationships with the environment in its largest sense. Efforts to achieve a surrealistic state often involved surprise or unexpected combinations of elements.

We might look to Naef’s comment on Magritte and suggest that almost any photograph “remove[s] an everyday object from its expected context.” Digital photos go in both directions – making the photo itself an everyday object AND an expected context on the one hand (cell phone) and a data set far more rich than that provided by most objects in their everyday context (Better Light.)

If I pick up a photograph of my son while I am sitting at my keyboard, I have in my hand a representation ripped from its temporal and spatial context. My son is more than one foot tall; he operates within at least three dimensions; he has a scent about him; he ages. In the photograph in my hand, he never ages; the stimuli striking my eyes re-engage the same neural pathways that his body did several years ago. This photograph is not a window on the world, so much as it is a two-dimensional projection of a three-dimensional moment in time. At the moment of my seeing the photograph, my son is not on the cross-country race course, he does not have blonde hair, his smile is no longer so youthful.

Perhaps the snapshot is for us so ordinary, so abundant that it no longer seems to embody an unexpected event. In the case of the photograph of my son, it is one of hundreds or even thousands of photographs made of him in his 23 years. Yet, upon reflection, it is surely unexpected, in at least some senses, that my 17 year old son is now in my office beaming a radiant smile; at the same time, my rational self “knows” that he 2,000 miles away living a life often quite separate from me.

This ripping out of context, surprise, the naturalist surrealism arising from skill at recording of a scene as found reaches some form of zenith in the ultra-high resolution of Ben Blackwell’s Better Light photographs. Better Light manufactures hardware and software that enable some of the highest resolution imaging available. Ben Blackwell has mastered techniques of presenting to the eyes of viewers stimulus sets closely resembling what the original objects would present to eyes. Yet, they also present qualities oddly at odds with visual expectations.

Blackwell’s photographs of buildings are, at first, striking because they look so like snapshots; indeed, they often appear to be snapshots of rather prosaic buildings or odd little buildings that serve prosaic functions. In the ice cream shop photo, a building crafted to resemble an ice cream cone is presented dead center, in violation of ordinary rules of composition. There are no people, no intriguing event takes place, no dramatic clouds draw the eye upward. Just an odd little building set right in the middle with a vertical utility pole and a horizontal red curbing adding to the rectilinear, snapshot character of the image.

However, the three elements of centrality, rectilinear framing, and lack of drama begin to take this image beyond even the posited surreality of the snapshot. The horizontal curb line is consciously placed just above the bottom frame line, not simply an unnoticed element in front of the lens of someone recording just the cute building. While many snapshots have a centrality – perhaps because of auto-focusing mechanisms normally operating in the center of the frame; perhaps because snapshooters simply care to make sure their primary object is shown full – Blackwell’s image is so perfectly centered that it gives the impression of being perfectly balanced, solid.

This combines the seeming ordinary nature of the snapshot with careful craft and, ultimately, a surrealist artistry. The application of years of technical training and many thousands of dollars worth of equipment is at odds with the ordinary experience of snapping a picture as one walks or drives by an ordinary scene. The very precision of the composition and technique behind the making of the image bespeaks a lack of spontaneity of a snapshot – often indicated by tilted framing, not-quite-centered subject, family or friends standing in front.

It might be suggested that another element is causes an unexpected reaction. The centrality and the secondary framing of the utility pole and curbing invite or compel repeated viewing both in and of themselves and in the “not-quite-rightness” of a snapshot that does not stimulate in the manner of a snapshot. In addition, the exposure is “perfect” – it has more dynamic range than the typical snapshot. There is detail in shadows at the same time that highlights are not “blown out.” Human eyes can span a large dynamic range, but not in a single view without adjustment over time. In that sense, the viewer is presented with a representation of a single slice of time that could not be seen by a human eye in that same small slice of time. This would be more “obvious” in a time exposure of automobile headlights at night, or in an Ansel Adams image of mountains and clouds – an image in a place out of the ordinary with a good deal of technical manipulation. The “uncommon” subject and lighting signal themselves and, so, do not present themselves as the “intersection of unexpected happenings.” The highly crafted snapshot, precisely by not announcing its specialness, presents us with a discord that bespeaks an intersection – subtle yet still an intersection.

Surreality could be argued on the basis of composition and craft alone, but another characteristic of the ultra-high resolution recording medium brings about different, heightened form of “removal of an everyday object from its expected context.” In the process of making unmediated views of the world we are quite capable of and accustomed to seeing the large “picture” and the details; however, this ordinarily requires some change of perspective, such as walking closer. That is, there is a conscious engagement and temporal component. The ultra-high resolution image presents the big picture and the details all at once. This is not to say that all can be attended without some form of engagement or change of engagement; however, the amount of distance and the length of the time component are (potentially) significantly reduced. Instead of having to stand across the street to see the large image of the ice cream shop and then walk across the street to read the prices, the viewer of the photograph need only turn his/her eyes or head or, perhaps walk one or two steps to one side or the other. Again, this is a subtle intersection of the unexpected.

   

We must remember that it is not at all unusual to see prints of photographs that are measured in feet rather than inches. What we are talking about in the work of Ben Blackwell is the intersection of imaging technology capable of producing large prints with extraordinary detail – much more than in the typical advertising poster, for example – with an extraordinary sense for representing the extraordinary, the surreal, in the ordinary.

In one small study of viewer engagement with ultra-high resolution photographs, we asked Blackwell to photograph one of the walls in my office – variously described as high entropy or messy. The resulting image is shown above in three instantiations: a fragment with someone viewing; a “standard” size print, and a longer view of the entire image in scale to the person in the image. The image required approximately two hours of set up time for composition, lighting (natural window light controlled by blinds and fluorescent tubes, all balanced by software manipulation,) lens selection, and other arcane of the craft.

We conducted some formal experiments with the image to determine how people would look at the images – given a choice, they would stand 10 feet back, then walk up and spend a long time looking at details; how much they would remember – more than those who saw the “standard” size print; and how they “felt” about the viewing experience – “entranced” by the detail and by having a “whole collection of images” in one print. Of course, habituation to such high resolution images would like reduce the “entranced” sense; but the sense of having multiple images within one print would likely remain.

More relevant to the concept of surreality was a set of observations of two dozen doctoral level information scientists crawling around on their hands and knees to examine a set of Blackwell images of various buildings. We needed a large impromptu venue, so we put the images on the floor outside a conference meeting room in a hotel. The anecdotal evidence was for a fascination with what looked like snapshots or “mere records” that just “were off” – this was evidently a technical term for the intersection of unexpected happenings. A few of the images did have people or other moving elements that cause interesting effects in the images because the digital technology requires long exposure times rather more like those of the photography of the 19^th century. So discussion did, at times, turn to calculations of 4-dimensional attributes, with time being the fourth dimension. Yet, over the course of an hour, the primary engagement by the vast majority of scientists was a fascination with the unexpected combination of the snapshot appearance with color, light, and resolution characteristics orders of magnitude different from snapshots.

So, we might posit that the notions of composition, dynamic range, and compression of time and distance into a high resolution image present to the viewer an intersection, a removal from the ordinary, a recording of the scene “as found” but not merely through a window give Blackwell’s photographs a surreal quality made all the more compelling by its surface level lack of artifice combined with characteristics at odds with that lack of artifice. That naïve viewers and information scientists, as many of them said, could not take their eyes off the images, lend credence to the thesis. Blackwell achieves the disruption, the intersection, the removal of context (often of the viewer rather than the viewed) with a subtlety and engagement in the best (most provocative) manner of the surrealists.

to see more of Ben Blackwell's work visit www.benblackwell.com