I’ve always loved Minor White‘s dictum to photograph something not only for what it is but also for “what else it is.” His images that accord best with that idea tend to be ambiguous ones of rocks, frost on windows, etc. I don’t really know whether or not he had clear ideas with particular images what else they were of. Which would be just like I don’t for the image above. But I do have a kind of feeling that it’s about more than a frozen stream at the base of Pine Creek Falls at the northern end of (I kid you not) Paradise Valley.
All of my pictures from that day last month would look monochrome even if I left them in full color. The tonal aspects are very strong, and they are made for figure/ground ambiguity: is my main subject rock or water or snow and ice? I’m still in the midst of working with these studies, but some preliminary versions can be found at Winter Water. My processing has been influenced by what I’ve been reading in the meantime, namely Jack Flam on Robert Motherwell (thanks, Doug P.), where I come across stuff like: “The dialogue of black and white forms the basis not only of Motherwell’s pictorial structure, but also of the implied subject matter…”
Open questions for discussion are various. Do these images have any appeal to anyone besides me? As either realistic depictions or abstract compositions? Can an image somehow be “equivalent” to a spiritual idea? Can you discover this through working with an image, or do you have to know it when you shoot it? And even if you think they stink, have you found experimenting with similar studies to be helpful in your own art work?
I suspect you’ll get a lot of different reactions to these questions. For me, images like this one (and I like to view them and to make them)are “about” the discovery of something unexpected and interesting that one might not notice if one only the subject for “what it is.”
The abstraction found in a concrete subject appeals to me, so I would answer your “realistic depiction/abstract composition” question by saying, for me, the latter.
Steve,
It strikes me as almost Continental.
D.s comment above made me look at the picture in a different way. Instead of straining to see details, I now sit back and enjoy the global view.
Steve,
These images are very appealing to me, but I don’t see the figure/ground ambiguity you speak of. That is, I don’t see it unless I try to see it.
Perhaps if you posted the picture up-side down?
The image in this post would be an interesting candidate for something to paint on, as we discussed yesterday. Imagine painting a cloudy sky where the ice is.
Steve,
THe “rips” that the water makes remind me of a clifford still painting,for example:
http://americanart.si.edu/images/1980/1980.5.10_1b.jpg
Maybe becuase I was just thinking about him in Colin’s post…
I do see the positive negative flipping, but then again I am always on the look out for it. I love that aspect.
Part of what I like about art is when it becomes something else other than what it is. I have a harder time with that with photogrpahy than any other art form – perhaps that is not uncommon. Robert Frank is one who comes to mind – his work becomes lots of different things for me – beautiful compositions, strong protraits, social commentary, melancholy musings:
http://m2.aol.com/UvGotMail/frank/frank.html
Landscape is always on the spiritual side of things for me. Something happens when I am outside in a beautiful space. But that is also a serious cultural construct for us city dwellers – the idea of the pure, untouched landscape (untouched, until someone like me tramps all over it). Studies are really important to me. I like to paint the same thing twice because I spend the first painting figuring stuff out and then in the second one stuff tends to flow and seem easier, have that look that it just flowed out of your paintbrush.
What do the studies do for you?
I have always been a fan of the noted and the connoted in photography, but, that said, I suspect for many, because of photography’s special (in the arts) relationship to the “real”, the connoted may be hard for some to get to.
“Straight” photographs – like the one displayed here – tend to be viewed by many (most) as literal images of the subject which the photographer has chosen to take note of.
IMO, “seeing” more in a photograph speaks more to the character and imagination of the observer than it does to that of the photographer in as much as most photographers who are very adept at insighting thoughts about the connoted rarely seem to think about the connoted at the time of the photograph’s creation.
I just wrote a comment and then must have pushed “reset” instead of post. Damn.
Turns out Mark said some of the stuff better than I about photographs being hard to read as anything else than what they are. Robert Frank is one exception for me:
http://m2.aol.com/UvGotMail/frank/frank.html
Partly becasue his compositions are so carefully designed and partly because he covers so much rich stuff on many levels in his work – , social commentary, portraits, melancholy, etc. I want to keep looking and finding stuff.
THese frozen stream photos remind me of Clyfford Still’s paintings with the dark water sort of ripping into the ice:
http://americanart.si.edu/images/1980/1980.5.10_1b.jpg
Of course I was just writing about him in Colin’s post so that has soemthing to do with it! I almost always relate photos to paintings, literally imagining what they would look like as paintings. So in that sense they become something else I suppose. And I always appreciate them for their design, the strictly visual sensations, such as that positive negative flipping that I see in these quite strongly.
Studies are important to me. They make the final work easier, more flowing, more open to discovery becasue some of the technical stuff has been worked out already.
What do studies do for you or for other photographers?
Hmm, I have treid to post a comment twice on this post and each time it has not shown up! Rex? help! THis will be a test.
I immediately saw it as a closeup of a chocolate chip cookie (white chocolate chips).
I immediately saw it as a closeup of a chocolate chip cookie (white chocolate).
delicious! My problem with posting seem to be solved…I am sure it is my current sugar coma that is causing some synapses to not connect – neuroscientists care to comment?
Will try to reconstruct the comment later…
David,
Then is the stream a river of chocolate rushing by?
Leslie, I had to post my comment twice before it took. The second time I just posted “test”, and when it appeared I went back and edited it.
David,Then is the stream a river of chocolate rushing by?
Ha! No, it’s that two-tone thing that happens when the outer cookie surface cracks and it shows the gooey part inside. There’s also a cup of coffee there, but it’s outside the frame.
David,
Impressive, you got it in one! Thereby spoiling my plan to let you wax all philosophical before telling you what it really was. Anyway, you’ve made me hungry, I’m going to lunch.
Steve, I’m relieved. I really had no idea what it was, and I was afraid you might be insulted that I saw it as a cookie :)
Plus, by saying it was a cookie, I thought I was waxing philosophical.
Revel fudge bars! The kind where it’s fudge with globs of dough on top.I am glad too that others have mentioned baked goods though. I can see that it’s water with broken ice but I immediately thought of the bars and I didn’t want to insult Steve.
Though I wouldn’t consider Revel bars an insult by any stretch of the imagination:-)
I’ve got to say, for me being able to see a cookie was kind of a breakthrough. For years I thought everything looked like pumpkin scones.
Steve,
I arrived too late to join the cookie conversation, but to answer one of your questions, yes, this sort of experimentation has been very helpful to me. Not only is it great for craft things, but also it is impossible to predict where it is going to lead. Definitely on of those ‘unless you take step one….’ things.
Also I agree with Mark. The speed of the capture process in photography makes us quite bad at seeing the extra ‘meanings’ in an image at the time of creation. So create and ponder, create and ponder.
Colin, bless you. It seems about the only gap these images fit into is the cavity in the collective sweet tooth. I’m canceling the frame order.
I think Karl’s been exploring the wrong business model. Forget selling art. We should have a bake sale!
Just to be clear, I don’t mind at all you chocoholic Philistines out there. But seriously, at the risk of looking silly, let me say a bit more about what I am trying to do with these. Responding to Karl, it’s not that one is likely to actually confuse figure and ground, at least if the images are viewed in correct orientation. But to me the shapes and contrasts between them start to take on a feeling of abstract tone fields of dark, gray, and white, and then I become interested in the composition of these tonal elements. Imagine the problem of filling completely a square or rectangle with two or three shades of pencil, watercolor, whatever. If you did a lot of those, or a lot of different people did them, are there any interesting relationships that might recur, maybe even something you could call archetypal? Is any sort of pattern more likely to strike a chord of some kind? I just started doing this late last night, so I don’t have any answers for myself. But I thought composition exercises in art school might be done with a similar goal, whether to discover something common or just personal.
The composition is sort of a fractured spiral. It’s like a variation on an archetypal form.
In my original comment that got swallowed up by cyber space, I made some more serious comments. It is an interesting topic to me.
As a painter, studies serve many purposes, and tell me if there are any cross overs to photo:
I get to practice depicting something without fear of “ruining” the final product.
I practice new techniques, color combinations and compositions.
I become intimately familiar with my subject matter so that in the final product I am comfortable and the paint tends to flow more. The struggle is lessened and I can move on from the more basic issues.
I get an idea of new directions the final product may take, as Colin alluded to above.
So I am all for studies. I am imagine in photography that much of what you is a study and then you pick what ends up being the “art.” It depends on how many images you take in one sitting. But I could be way off base.
Before the cookie thing, I was reminded of CLifford Still, he has been on my mind: http://americanart.si.edu/images/1980/1980.5.10_1b.jpg
THe way one form seems to rip into another. I respond very strongly to the flipping of the positive and negative spaces, but I am really always looking for those spacial “tricks.”
Another question for you:
Do you ever end up showing your studies, or considering them finished, esp in the context of a series of images?
Leslie,
Thanks for the Clyfford Still link. I haven’t seen his work before, but it reminds me a bit, like some “monster” images of Motherwell here and here, of (parts of) some of the photos referenced in my last post, especially this one.
I don’t take lots of images in general, though I often shoot exposure variations. And almost all my work is done relatively slowly and using a tripod, so I usually have plenty of time to examine the image. I haven’t done enough of this type of study to have a chance to show any yet. Some, with work, might be interesting. The idea of the studies is not so much to select the best, but to train my eye to see strong compositions so that I can compose better in the field next time.
David,
Thanks, I see that form in the picture in the post. Others seem to involve more triangles.
Leslie and David,
Some comments of yours got caught by the automatic spam filter. I “un-spammed” them a moment ago. The comments are, I think, #’s 5,7 and 9.
I’m not quite sure why they got caught, but I think the filter is adaptive and should learn not to hold on to your comments in the future.
The filter catches a lot of real spam which, if it got through, would ruin the flow of discussion. I’m sorry for not catching the problem with your comments earlier. If your comment seems to disappear, email Rex or me right away to ask us to check if it got held as potential spam.
Oh, my previous comments from earlier today came back – how bizarre! Hopefully I didn’t repeat myself too much. Yes, your photos of the ghost town buildings have that same feel of shapes being ripped into other shapes. Thanks for the Motherwell images – never saw those particular ones.
Steve,
Earlier I wrote: “I don’t see the figure/ground ambiguity you speak of. That is, I don’t see it unless I try to see it.”
I’ve been looking at this image all evening here in Haarlem. It is difficult for me to see the normal figure/ground relations now. Visual adaptation is a fascinating topic.
I lied. I have to respond.
Neuroscientists (you all perhaps know this already) have found that music that is new to its listeners, something like the Rite of Spring, shows up in brain patterns as disruptive bits, without the normal rhythmic patterning that familiar music causes brain scans to show. But the brain adapts, so that one year after the audience rioted over the Rite of Spring,it was presented to standing ovations. The brains of a mass audience stopped popping around erratically and settled into a soothing rhythm — the rhythm not of the music itself, but of understanding.
Which, I would suggest, has at least metaphoric resonance for Karl’s last comment.
Here’s the url for Rite of Spring. I seem to have lost the instructions about embedding them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rite_of_Spring
June,
Interesting about the music, I hadn’t heard about that. Adaptation is a basic principle of brain operation with a lot of interesting subtleties. But I think the change in audience response to Rite of Spring had more to do with expectations based on all kinds of social/cultural information. Expectations play a huge role in response to art, a topic we’ve touched on more in passing than directly, as far as I know. It would be nice to have a good post to collect ideas, and of course there’s a lot that’s relevant to market-minded folks. Any takers? It won’t be me…
Why do I keep missing the most interesting “dialogs” going on here?
Like Dan Mitchell, I like abstract images that also seem concrete, real. Although it is possible to do this in painting–Clyfford Still is a great example and one of my own favorites–it seems that photography might be at an advantage here.
I’ll admit that I’m not usually a huge fan of photography (which is why I’m reluctant to write about it). I’m not particularly sure why this is, but I think the pervasive tendency towards the literal may be one reason–rivers that look like rivers, people that look like people, etcetera. I find this approach more compelling in painting, where realism seems to be less dogmatically real (if that makes any sense).
Anyway, a compelling image–interesting figure/ground shifts and ambiguity of scale (cookies or continents).
Arthur,
Yes, I think photography has a real advantage here. I think I rather missed the mark on this post; I tried to bring in too many things at once and didn’t have enough time to do what I want with the images. But at least doing it helped give me a better idea of where I want to take this series of exercises. In the digital darkroom I can adjust tones and/or cropping to either keep the images quite realistic or make them quite abstract, so that it would become hard to recognize the original material. I’m interested in what real compositions lead to the most appealing abstract ones. I’m also interested in whether operating near the realistic/abstract boundary, on one side or the other, has any particular appeal. I often enjoy art where I have to work a little but can figure things out satisfactorily. We’ll see whether I learn anything from the attempt…