Here we have a kickstarter for a book
about teen obesity, focusing on (to some degree I cannot fully discern) a single subject named Shannon. The photographer, Abbie Trayler-Smith, started
working with Shannon when the latter was 15 years old, and I think we may freely assume that at least some photos of underage Shannon
appear in the book. In addition, it seems that quite a few sexualized photos of Shannon (presumably no longer underage, let us hope the
records are in order) appear.
This book is getting a certain amount of support from what we might describe as "the usual suspects" on social media. This same group is
rather fond of pointing out exploitative projects in which, say, underage girls in Africa are photographed for one reason of another.
These photos are invariably "bad" because they're exploitative, not empathetic, and so on. There is a whole litany, repeated in chorus
at appropriate intervals.
While I may quibble about the details of the litany, to do so is not my intention today. Let us stipulate that the litany is spot
on in every detail, for the moment.
The point I want to make here is that every accusation leveled at the Bad Photos can also be leveled at Kiss It!
A common refrain we hear is that "these photos" would never be taken of white people. As Kiss It! illustrates (but see also,
for example, Mary Ellen Mark's photos of Erin Blackwell, "Tiny") this isn't really true. You could argue that Kiss It!
is built around, perhaps, an empathy with the subject that's not present in the colonial, bad, pictures. This is, I think,
a difficult row to hoe, and frankly I think to make that argument would be to project onto the pictures things that are simply not visible,
not present.
What is, I think, actually going on is much more nefarious.
When we see the pictures of Shannon, whatever else we see we tend to imagine a kind of agency. Shannon, we feel, is capable of
meaningful consent in a way that a Black girl, especially a Black girl in Africa is not. You could substitute in a girl in
Guatemala, or New Guinea, with the same effect.
We are, it turns out, much more willing to accept a narrative of "incapable of meaningful consent, and therefore probably
exploited" when we see a picture of someone in the Global South, and we are much more willing to accept a narrative of
"sufficiently sophisticated and aware of contemporary media culture to give valid, meaningful, consent" when we see
a person apparently from the "global north" especially if they are white.
I don't mean to particularly point an accusing finger. I feel it too.
Indeed, there is an argument to be made that people from the global south, as a category, genuinely do have less
agency. Poverty, for instance, might well have pushed someone into being photographed when they might otherwise
have preferred not to be. People in the global south are indeed more likely to be impoverished, it's part of the
definition. There is a necessarily probabilistic argument you can make here. But, it's an argument about likelihoods,
not specific cases.
People like Shannon can also be poor, and people in Africa have cell phones and instagram accounts. You
can't just make blanket statements. If the photographer says they worked closely, collaboratively, with their subjects
and and otherwise checked all the boxes, it's not right to simply say "lol, liar" simply because the photos were
made in Thailand. Photographers can absolutely parachute in to a place in the USA, take a bunch of shitty
titty shots, and pretend that it's anthropology. Exploitation, as well as its opposite, can in fact
take place anywhere.
I don't think that the subject's skin color is a particularly reliable indicator of the degree of exploitation
in play, although it might loosely correlate.
I'm not super happy about the Kiss It! project. It strikes me as exploitative. It's hitting a fairly chic
topic, in a fairly chic way. There's a depressing amount of the "let's photograph her naked, because that's
empowering" trope. It strikes me as essentially too obvious to be taken very seriously. Trayler-Smith wants to
"challenge what it means to be fat" which is either a meaningless artspeak noise, or, if it means anything
at all she merely wants to remind us that obese people are people. Does this obvious fact bear repeating?
I suppose?
I'm sure Abbie and
Shannon are indeed friends, and that it's very lovely, but at the end of the day Abbie wants to take
a bunch of photos of her friend and boost her own career with them. She wants to turn Shannon's life,
specifically the hard parts of that life, and turn that into grist for a "Abbie is a Very Serious
Photographer" narrative. Trayler-Smith wants not merely to say "fat people are people too" she wants
to get a cookie for repeating this well-established and oft-repeated refrain. While it may bear
repeating, I don't see why Trayler-Smith ought to earn a cookie for doing so.
Maybe the book will be great, I dunno. It doesn't look too great to me. It looks dated, shallow, and try-hard.
Saturday, September 10, 2022
Monday, September 5, 2022
Art and AI, Part II
I wrote about this a while ago, which ramblings you may read here. I may
have gotten slightly sidetracked into making fun of how far "AI research" is from what many people seem to imagine its end goal
is, in that piece. Let's take a more art-centric tack, to oppose the AI-centric one.
Some AI generated art piece won a ribbon at a state fair somewhere, recently. It is, obviously, a ridiculous, twee, mess, because that's the sort of thing that wins ribbons at these things. Be that as it may, it is certainly true that this category of AI engines will shortly, if they do not already, generate things that are not particularly twee.
So what?
I promised art-centristry, so here we go. I maintain that art is defined not by how it is made, or what it is made of, but by what it does. It strikes us. It at least has the capacity to enlarge us. But more than that, it means.
A mountain strikes us, enlarges us, but it would be silly to categorize it as Art simply as it stands there. It does not mean in the sense that we generally consider Art to. It does not stand for anything, it is not a symbol, it carries no message and can carry no message (unless, perhaps, from God, in which case everything is Art and the word dissolves into nothing, so let us set that aside.) A mountain, sublime as it may be, represents only itself. Art strikes us, and we believe in some kind of intention in that strike. We believe in the author and we wonder at the author's intent, no matter how vigorously we would cleave to a deconstructionist theory.
This can be broken down further, and indeed we have seen it broken down. The idea that an object might have semiotics, that it might indicate something other than itself, that it might symbolize, is separate from the idea that this meaning is intentional, that it is authored.
The Dada artists did some experiments with automatic drawing, automatic writing, that kind of thing. Others have used randomness, or mechanical means, to make paintings or whatever. These things can symbolize, they can have a semiotics in a way that a mountain does not.
Indeed, you could argue that the automatic drawings acquire meaning in exactly the way that a photograph of a mountain does, in the process of selecting which one to keep and which ones to discard.
If, as I believe, photography is not really an act of creation, but one of selection, then perhaps both automatic drawing and AI generated art are essentially the same as photography. The details of the construction of the thing itself are left up to chance, or the machine; while guidance is applied beforehand, and selection afterwards. Perhaps that is enough?
Will the AI replace the photographer? It might. Will I be able to pump in 3 phone snaps of myself and say "make me a powerful and moving portrait with a key light, a fill light, a hair light, a kicker, and a pink gelled background that also depicts me with a warm and authentic smile as if I am looking not at a camera but at you" and have it do that? Maybe. Probably? Sad for photographers, I guess, but jobs go obsolete, it's a thing. There will probably be a gradually shrinking pool of cases in which the explicit control of actually taking the picture will be worth the extra effort of actually taking the picture.
Of course, there will also always be room for someone to take photos of actual things that actually happen, as records, as documents of the thing, of the event. Perhaps all those photos will be run through the AI to pretty 'em up before we ever see them.
Probably a market for raw material for the mill (see "phone snaps" in the portrait example.)
I do not believe that the photograph as itself will carry any substantive cultural weight. I have given up on the idea that somehow the actual realness of the frame is what matters to ordinary people; what matters is that it looks real, not that it is real, and the machines can certainly make it look real.
Is it art? Sure it's art. It's as art as a photo, as art as an automatic or random drawing. Better than the last two, it tends to actually look like something, so it's not a largely theoretical footnote in art history. It looks like something, and it can mean in the approriate way. What's not to like?
Some AI generated art piece won a ribbon at a state fair somewhere, recently. It is, obviously, a ridiculous, twee, mess, because that's the sort of thing that wins ribbons at these things. Be that as it may, it is certainly true that this category of AI engines will shortly, if they do not already, generate things that are not particularly twee.
So what?
I promised art-centristry, so here we go. I maintain that art is defined not by how it is made, or what it is made of, but by what it does. It strikes us. It at least has the capacity to enlarge us. But more than that, it means.
A mountain strikes us, enlarges us, but it would be silly to categorize it as Art simply as it stands there. It does not mean in the sense that we generally consider Art to. It does not stand for anything, it is not a symbol, it carries no message and can carry no message (unless, perhaps, from God, in which case everything is Art and the word dissolves into nothing, so let us set that aside.) A mountain, sublime as it may be, represents only itself. Art strikes us, and we believe in some kind of intention in that strike. We believe in the author and we wonder at the author's intent, no matter how vigorously we would cleave to a deconstructionist theory.
This can be broken down further, and indeed we have seen it broken down. The idea that an object might have semiotics, that it might indicate something other than itself, that it might symbolize, is separate from the idea that this meaning is intentional, that it is authored.
The Dada artists did some experiments with automatic drawing, automatic writing, that kind of thing. Others have used randomness, or mechanical means, to make paintings or whatever. These things can symbolize, they can have a semiotics in a way that a mountain does not.
Indeed, you could argue that the automatic drawings acquire meaning in exactly the way that a photograph of a mountain does, in the process of selecting which one to keep and which ones to discard.
If, as I believe, photography is not really an act of creation, but one of selection, then perhaps both automatic drawing and AI generated art are essentially the same as photography. The details of the construction of the thing itself are left up to chance, or the machine; while guidance is applied beforehand, and selection afterwards. Perhaps that is enough?
Will the AI replace the photographer? It might. Will I be able to pump in 3 phone snaps of myself and say "make me a powerful and moving portrait with a key light, a fill light, a hair light, a kicker, and a pink gelled background that also depicts me with a warm and authentic smile as if I am looking not at a camera but at you" and have it do that? Maybe. Probably? Sad for photographers, I guess, but jobs go obsolete, it's a thing. There will probably be a gradually shrinking pool of cases in which the explicit control of actually taking the picture will be worth the extra effort of actually taking the picture.
Of course, there will also always be room for someone to take photos of actual things that actually happen, as records, as documents of the thing, of the event. Perhaps all those photos will be run through the AI to pretty 'em up before we ever see them.
Probably a market for raw material for the mill (see "phone snaps" in the portrait example.)
I do not believe that the photograph as itself will carry any substantive cultural weight. I have given up on the idea that somehow the actual realness of the frame is what matters to ordinary people; what matters is that it looks real, not that it is real, and the machines can certainly make it look real.
Is it art? Sure it's art. It's as art as a photo, as art as an automatic or random drawing. Better than the last two, it tends to actually look like something, so it's not a largely theoretical footnote in art history. It looks like something, and it can mean in the approriate way. What's not to like?
Thursday, September 1, 2022
The Single Use Photo
In what follows I will sound, I am fully aware, exactly like a grumpy old man shouting at clouds.
Be that as it may.
Back in the Good Olde Dayes, say, the 1990s, we mostly walked around with, at most, 36 exposures at our beck and call. More if we wanted to fiddle around changing film. We tended to gravitate toward pictures with some weight, whether memorializing something or trying to make a picture somehow "worth printing." We might take a bunch of crummy snaps of Christmas, but because it was Christmas, because it was a memory we wanted to preserve. We might take a bunch of pictures of the crane silhoutted against the sky, but generally with the idea that one of these frames might be a wall-hanger or that at least we were developing skills aimed at some day taking a wall-hanger.
The advent of digital photography made it free to press the button, and the advent of social media created a whole new category of venue for our photos. No longer did they have to have gravitas, no more did they need to be wall-hangers. They could just be pretty, or witty, or fun. Go nuts, take a 100 of them.
Of course, in the old days, we took these things too. Less of them, I think, and we threw them away because there wasn't anything to be done with them. Oh look, a pretty flower. Oh look, a funny sign, or a sign made funny by the guy with the hat standing in front of it. They're not wall-hangers, they're a new kind of consumable, intended to be looked at one (1) time only. They're single-use photos.
"Street photography" is maybe where this is most visible. Compare Robert Frank's book with the stuff we see today. Every frame of Frank's is loaded with meaning, with symbols, with structure. He's trying to communicate something. Most of modern street photography is making a throwaway joke, or noting a momentarily interesting juxtaposition of stuff. Yeah, yeah, there's all sorts of material about a story, but that's BS. The point is that the triangular shadow is pointing at the guy, wow, or that we have strong foreground elements framing a background element, or the complete stranger is doing a funny thing. These are are "lol, next" single-use photos.
The Guardian's "LensCulture street photography awards" are pretty much all of this sort. These are mostly photos nobody would have circled on the contact sheet, but since we've been mired in a photographic culture built around "lol, next" photos, this is now an actual style, a genre, that gets awards. Look at how many of these things are literally "someone's head is covered up by a foreground object, lol."
We see the same phenomenon on random social media, as well. I won't name names, but this morning I ran across a photo, a perfectly pleasing "pretty" picture of nothing, that someone posted to social media. He will never print it, it's very much a "look once, and never again" photo, although it's perfectly pleasant to look at once. Some rando made a negative comment, which is neither here nor there, and then of course the original poster's friends jumped all over extolling the virtues of this essentially throwaway picture. A tale as old as time, if we take "time" as beginning about 2010.
I'm not even arguing that this is a bad thing, it is what it is. The point is, it's a new thing. The idea of the throwaway picture, the "hey, look at this, cool huh?" "yeah, cool" photo, the single-use photo, is by far the dominant idiom. It is what photographers aspire to learn to do. There are millions of hours of youtube videos that teach you how to do this. It mostly didn't exist before 2010.
I have this vague notion that I wrote something like this a long long time ago, the idea of a photo as an artifact that says no more than "look at this?" but I can't find it.
Back in the Good Olde Dayes, say, the 1990s, we mostly walked around with, at most, 36 exposures at our beck and call. More if we wanted to fiddle around changing film. We tended to gravitate toward pictures with some weight, whether memorializing something or trying to make a picture somehow "worth printing." We might take a bunch of crummy snaps of Christmas, but because it was Christmas, because it was a memory we wanted to preserve. We might take a bunch of pictures of the crane silhoutted against the sky, but generally with the idea that one of these frames might be a wall-hanger or that at least we were developing skills aimed at some day taking a wall-hanger.
The advent of digital photography made it free to press the button, and the advent of social media created a whole new category of venue for our photos. No longer did they have to have gravitas, no more did they need to be wall-hangers. They could just be pretty, or witty, or fun. Go nuts, take a 100 of them.
Of course, in the old days, we took these things too. Less of them, I think, and we threw them away because there wasn't anything to be done with them. Oh look, a pretty flower. Oh look, a funny sign, or a sign made funny by the guy with the hat standing in front of it. They're not wall-hangers, they're a new kind of consumable, intended to be looked at one (1) time only. They're single-use photos.
"Street photography" is maybe where this is most visible. Compare Robert Frank's book with the stuff we see today. Every frame of Frank's is loaded with meaning, with symbols, with structure. He's trying to communicate something. Most of modern street photography is making a throwaway joke, or noting a momentarily interesting juxtaposition of stuff. Yeah, yeah, there's all sorts of material about a story, but that's BS. The point is that the triangular shadow is pointing at the guy, wow, or that we have strong foreground elements framing a background element, or the complete stranger is doing a funny thing. These are are "lol, next" single-use photos.
The Guardian's "LensCulture street photography awards" are pretty much all of this sort. These are mostly photos nobody would have circled on the contact sheet, but since we've been mired in a photographic culture built around "lol, next" photos, this is now an actual style, a genre, that gets awards. Look at how many of these things are literally "someone's head is covered up by a foreground object, lol."
We see the same phenomenon on random social media, as well. I won't name names, but this morning I ran across a photo, a perfectly pleasing "pretty" picture of nothing, that someone posted to social media. He will never print it, it's very much a "look once, and never again" photo, although it's perfectly pleasant to look at once. Some rando made a negative comment, which is neither here nor there, and then of course the original poster's friends jumped all over extolling the virtues of this essentially throwaway picture. A tale as old as time, if we take "time" as beginning about 2010.
I'm not even arguing that this is a bad thing, it is what it is. The point is, it's a new thing. The idea of the throwaway picture, the "hey, look at this, cool huh?" "yeah, cool" photo, the single-use photo, is by far the dominant idiom. It is what photographers aspire to learn to do. There are millions of hours of youtube videos that teach you how to do this. It mostly didn't exist before 2010.
I have this vague notion that I wrote something like this a long long time ago, the idea of a photo as an artifact that says no more than "look at this?" but I can't find it.
Monday, August 29, 2022
A Wedding
We wrapped up the mayhem that is Summer Holiday with a wedding in Portland, OR. L and C,
a pair of beautiful brides, got married in stunning style in a series of events over three
days. Replacing the mook in the tux with a second bride is genius, it just looks way
way better. We attended all of it, and enjoyed the hell out of every second. C is not, as I
understand it, deaf herself, but is a part of the deaf community. CORRECTION: C identifies as
deaf, and while she has some degree of hearing, it is partial. There are probably
technical terms that would define this precisely, I decline to demonstrate my
ignorance. Thus, there was a lot of ASL
in play, which was humbling for a non-speaker like me in all the best ways. Also,
lesbian weddings appear to be an unbroken wall of incredibly hot women, but I felt
somehow that they were mostly long-shots, and also my wife was there; I stuck to
the canapés.
None of this has anything to do with my point here. What does matter is that L has a remarkable smile. One of those 1000 watt smiles. L was visibly nervous and tense, so it was always a pleasure when the smile popped out. (C is getting short shrift here, but L is my wife's friend, so there.)
After the ceremony the brides were being flogged through the intense gamut of Mandatory Photographs, off to one side, while the rest of us sat around drinking and eating and talking. I won't accuse anyone else, but if you wanted to compare me to some exquisitely self-satisfied farm animal, I would unable to mount a credible rebuttal. Since I am me, though, I noticed the photographic suffering going on over there.
For each grouping, L turned on the smile, BAM. Snap. Then the smile faded quickly and she was back to marshalling the next grouping, and then the smile, and Snap, and so on.
I would never accuse L of a false smile. I am certain that for each photo she took a breath, and found that happy place, that joy in the moment, and brought it out for the camera, for the photo. Nevertheless, that smile has the character of a pose. Of course, everyone else was posing at least as much, but I wasn't looking at them. I'm looking at the brides, duh.
Ok, so what?
Well, later on, having observed L's extremely poised camera pose, I noticed her with her wife, notably, but also with other friends, every now and then having a moment even in the stress and madness of a gigantic wedding. The smile would come out again. Subtly but palpably different. I tried to quantify what was different, but it's not obvious. Something about the eyes. I think she lets her eyes close a little when there's no camera.
That was special. The same 1000 watts, maybe 1100, but without the pose. Powered entirely by joy. Again, it's not a difference between "false" and "genuine" at all, it's just the context, the intent, the moment. Posing for the camera is one thing, and being in the calming presence of your loved ones is another. I'll unbend enough to propose that the latter is somehow warmer.
Long time readers, at least the attentive ones, will notice that this is a difference I harp on constantly, the difference between the pose, "camera face," and this other thing, this warmer, emotion-powered thing that somehow sidesteps the camera. The the difference between a good portrait and a great one is when that warmer non-pose is directed, somehow, at the camera. The sitter sees "you" rather than the lens, the sitter feels seen rather than observed.
To pose for the camera, to "act" in some sense (although the act may be a performance of some truth), but to not act for the close friend, for the loved one, is thoroughly natual to us. We do it automatically, without thought, and indeed to do otherwise borders on the impossible. The point of the great portraitist, of the great portrait, is that the sitter is "natural" in front of the lens, despite awareness of the lens.
It's a subtle distinction, and unless you see it side-by-side, you might never notice the difference. Nevertheless, it's real, and we humans as, essentially, face-reading machines with stomachs, notice it instantly in the right circumstances. The meaning of the two postures is quite different, and getting that committed to a photograph is quite a trick.
Also, it was extremely fun to watch, and very warming to the soul. I have high hopes for C and L, and wish them the very very very best. Plus, they throw a hell of a party, omg. So good.
None of this has anything to do with my point here. What does matter is that L has a remarkable smile. One of those 1000 watt smiles. L was visibly nervous and tense, so it was always a pleasure when the smile popped out. (C is getting short shrift here, but L is my wife's friend, so there.)
After the ceremony the brides were being flogged through the intense gamut of Mandatory Photographs, off to one side, while the rest of us sat around drinking and eating and talking. I won't accuse anyone else, but if you wanted to compare me to some exquisitely self-satisfied farm animal, I would unable to mount a credible rebuttal. Since I am me, though, I noticed the photographic suffering going on over there.
For each grouping, L turned on the smile, BAM. Snap. Then the smile faded quickly and she was back to marshalling the next grouping, and then the smile, and Snap, and so on.
I would never accuse L of a false smile. I am certain that for each photo she took a breath, and found that happy place, that joy in the moment, and brought it out for the camera, for the photo. Nevertheless, that smile has the character of a pose. Of course, everyone else was posing at least as much, but I wasn't looking at them. I'm looking at the brides, duh.
Ok, so what?
Well, later on, having observed L's extremely poised camera pose, I noticed her with her wife, notably, but also with other friends, every now and then having a moment even in the stress and madness of a gigantic wedding. The smile would come out again. Subtly but palpably different. I tried to quantify what was different, but it's not obvious. Something about the eyes. I think she lets her eyes close a little when there's no camera.
That was special. The same 1000 watts, maybe 1100, but without the pose. Powered entirely by joy. Again, it's not a difference between "false" and "genuine" at all, it's just the context, the intent, the moment. Posing for the camera is one thing, and being in the calming presence of your loved ones is another. I'll unbend enough to propose that the latter is somehow warmer.
Long time readers, at least the attentive ones, will notice that this is a difference I harp on constantly, the difference between the pose, "camera face," and this other thing, this warmer, emotion-powered thing that somehow sidesteps the camera. The the difference between a good portrait and a great one is when that warmer non-pose is directed, somehow, at the camera. The sitter sees "you" rather than the lens, the sitter feels seen rather than observed.
To pose for the camera, to "act" in some sense (although the act may be a performance of some truth), but to not act for the close friend, for the loved one, is thoroughly natual to us. We do it automatically, without thought, and indeed to do otherwise borders on the impossible. The point of the great portraitist, of the great portrait, is that the sitter is "natural" in front of the lens, despite awareness of the lens.
It's a subtle distinction, and unless you see it side-by-side, you might never notice the difference. Nevertheless, it's real, and we humans as, essentially, face-reading machines with stomachs, notice it instantly in the right circumstances. The meaning of the two postures is quite different, and getting that committed to a photograph is quite a trick.
Also, it was extremely fun to watch, and very warming to the soul. I have high hopes for C and L, and wish them the very very very best. Plus, they throw a hell of a party, omg. So good.
Sunday, August 21, 2022
It's All Contingent
It is, I think, an established fact or at least truism among professional pollsters that you can draw
pretty much any desired answer to any specific question, if you precede the question with other
questions crafted in the right way. Want to prove that The Voters support Tough On Crime measures?
Or the reverse? Craft your sequence of questions appropriately.
At the same time, in this century, we have philosophers who are fond of posing questions about whether one would, or would not, save the baby under this circumstance or that.
The essential feature of a philosophy, or or a system of ethics, is that it should reliably produce the same answer repeatedly, when confronted with the same problem, repeatedly.
This isn't how people work, at all, so in a large sense this sort of thing is an utterly bankrupt procedure. I have become convinced that our actions, our ideas of right and wrong, and all our more nuanced judgements, are highly contingent. They depend upon the sequence of questions leading up to the question of interest. Our entire sense of society is built around weirdly arbitrary not-even-rules like "is the baby nearby, or on another continent?" and "am I related to the baby?" and "do I know the baby's parents?" and so on, to say nothing of "I got paid yesterday" versus "I don't get paid for another three weeks" and also the weather and phase of the moon and how pleasant the clerk was just now.
You could probably make some evolutionary argument, to the effect that we human apes are always optimizing for local something-or-other and as such all decisions are made in the context of a gestalt where-are-we-now. But it doesn't matter where it comes from or why, what matters to me here and now is that this seems to be the way we work. We arrive at conclusion A here and now, and presented with what is apparently an identical problem save perhaps for some trivial details tomorrow, we arrive at precisely the opposite conclusion, not A. This is normal, this is human. Our ideas of ethics, of philosophy, of meaning, being built on the idea of repeatability, are bankrupt and wrong in human terms.
When we come upon a scene in the real world, our reaction to it, our understanding of it, is contingent in the same way. I come across a group of homeless people in the park, and because I am a good liberal I am sympathetic to their plight and mentally cut them some slack. Except when I don't. Sometimes I long to horsewhip their filthy littering asses out of my park and down to the Mission to clean up and dry out and get a goddamned job. I am the same person. The situation is the same. But the gestalt where-am-I-now is always in flux, and as such, my reaction varies.
Insofar as we react to a photograph as-if it were the real world, our reaction to is it necessarily contingent in the same way and for the same reasons.
In general it seems reasonable that the more powerfully the hand of the author can assert itself in a work of art, the less contingent the meaning is likely to be. In this case I refer to the "meaning" that some normie will make of it, not some scholarly interpretation. So, a movie or a novel is likely to be understood in relative terms in a less contingent way than a painting, which in turn is (generally, relatively) understood in a less contingent way than a photograph, which itself falls to the contingency with which we understand the world as a whole.
There are, I think, two quite separate factors here. The first is that a heavy-handed author leaves less room for interpretation. In the limiting case all you can do is accept or reject the conclusion. The second factor is that preparation of the viewer business that pollsters know about. You can, at least in theory, warm the viewer up to your ideas. In this latter case, the Art or whatever is the whole thing, all the context, the text, the pictures, whatever, and the viewer is assumed to bringing whatever they are today to it. But the Art as a whole can in theory modify the condition of who-you-are to a degree and bring out some kind of reaction which is.. I don't even know. Is it better or worse? It's probably different, and maybe more profound? If the purpose of Art is to affect the viewer rather than to simply lecture, I guess the idea of changing the who-are-you-now gestalt is desireable.
A photograph more or less by itself, especially a documentary-styled photograph, lies fairly far on the contingent end of things. We're likely to make sense of it based on who we are, but more than that, on who we are at this moment. You as the artist can try to shape the experience, or to nail down the meaning, but the photo itself is elusive.
At the same time, in this century, we have philosophers who are fond of posing questions about whether one would, or would not, save the baby under this circumstance or that.
The essential feature of a philosophy, or or a system of ethics, is that it should reliably produce the same answer repeatedly, when confronted with the same problem, repeatedly.
This isn't how people work, at all, so in a large sense this sort of thing is an utterly bankrupt procedure. I have become convinced that our actions, our ideas of right and wrong, and all our more nuanced judgements, are highly contingent. They depend upon the sequence of questions leading up to the question of interest. Our entire sense of society is built around weirdly arbitrary not-even-rules like "is the baby nearby, or on another continent?" and "am I related to the baby?" and "do I know the baby's parents?" and so on, to say nothing of "I got paid yesterday" versus "I don't get paid for another three weeks" and also the weather and phase of the moon and how pleasant the clerk was just now.
You could probably make some evolutionary argument, to the effect that we human apes are always optimizing for local something-or-other and as such all decisions are made in the context of a gestalt where-are-we-now. But it doesn't matter where it comes from or why, what matters to me here and now is that this seems to be the way we work. We arrive at conclusion A here and now, and presented with what is apparently an identical problem save perhaps for some trivial details tomorrow, we arrive at precisely the opposite conclusion, not A. This is normal, this is human. Our ideas of ethics, of philosophy, of meaning, being built on the idea of repeatability, are bankrupt and wrong in human terms.
When we come upon a scene in the real world, our reaction to it, our understanding of it, is contingent in the same way. I come across a group of homeless people in the park, and because I am a good liberal I am sympathetic to their plight and mentally cut them some slack. Except when I don't. Sometimes I long to horsewhip their filthy littering asses out of my park and down to the Mission to clean up and dry out and get a goddamned job. I am the same person. The situation is the same. But the gestalt where-am-I-now is always in flux, and as such, my reaction varies.
Insofar as we react to a photograph as-if it were the real world, our reaction to is it necessarily contingent in the same way and for the same reasons.
In general it seems reasonable that the more powerfully the hand of the author can assert itself in a work of art, the less contingent the meaning is likely to be. In this case I refer to the "meaning" that some normie will make of it, not some scholarly interpretation. So, a movie or a novel is likely to be understood in relative terms in a less contingent way than a painting, which in turn is (generally, relatively) understood in a less contingent way than a photograph, which itself falls to the contingency with which we understand the world as a whole.
There are, I think, two quite separate factors here. The first is that a heavy-handed author leaves less room for interpretation. In the limiting case all you can do is accept or reject the conclusion. The second factor is that preparation of the viewer business that pollsters know about. You can, at least in theory, warm the viewer up to your ideas. In this latter case, the Art or whatever is the whole thing, all the context, the text, the pictures, whatever, and the viewer is assumed to bringing whatever they are today to it. But the Art as a whole can in theory modify the condition of who-you-are to a degree and bring out some kind of reaction which is.. I don't even know. Is it better or worse? It's probably different, and maybe more profound? If the purpose of Art is to affect the viewer rather than to simply lecture, I guess the idea of changing the who-are-you-now gestalt is desireable.
A photograph more or less by itself, especially a documentary-styled photograph, lies fairly far on the contingent end of things. We're likely to make sense of it based on who we are, but more than that, on who we are at this moment. You as the artist can try to shape the experience, or to nail down the meaning, but the photo itself is elusive.
Tuesday, August 16, 2022
In The Forest
In the forest we find these things at least: plants comprising trees, shrubs, bushes, ferns, mosses, and sundry smaller plants; fungi of the toadstool sort and of the shelving sort and of the spreading sort and of the sort made of invisible threads meshed through and through the fallen leaves and earth and roots; and animals; bugs that fly and bugs that crawl and bugs that dig and bugs that do all of them; and animals with scales and animals with fur and small animals that scurry and climb and animals that slink and hide and animals that lumber and decline to hide although even they are often shy and animals with wings and feathers that flit or soar and that sit on twigs, on branches and others that cling to the side of the tree with skewed toes and some that hop on the earth below. I suppose there are also algaes and lichens down among the fungi and painted peeling on rocks and trees and anything else that holds still enough.
It is the trees, though, that we see. Hanging from the sky with roots gently brushing the earth grasping at the earth dangling from the clouds trees infinitely long to us below who gape up from the ground they seem barely to touch, although we know really that there is as much tree underneath as there is tree above.
This is what we see. What we hear, mostly, but mostly do not see are animals. Chitter. Chirp. A scurrying rustle and cry of alarm or of rage and the whomp of wing stirring the air and the rattle of a beetle and on and on. Left to their own devices, the trees would make no sound at all except, rarely, the crunching crashing bang of a falling branch or stem grown too far for too long and succumbing finally to the infinite patience of gravity. The movement of air encroaches from time to time, fluttering leaf on leaf, creaking limb on limb here and groaning trunk there but otherwise, the trees in even a small forest a thousand thousand tons of fiber and living tissue go about the business of living in complete silence. The umwelt of the tree is empty of the animal kingdom, contains nothing of humanity perceived if at all as instantaneous incomprehensible violence no more experienced than we experience quantum mechanics, a violence that kills in the interval between two moments or which leaves a wound that heals slowly. The trees get on with the business of living, of starving the other plants of light and water and life, of murder and of symbiosis all at a pace no more perceptible to us than the axe to the tree.
The enormous indifferent mass of trees from sky to earth muffles sound with the mass of wood, of leaves, and the mass and volume of air enclosed within the trees pinned to the clouds swallows up the chattering and scuffling and rattling of rootless mobile life, renders the sounds soft and distant. The largest groves the eldest the tallest, lift the sounds up and away into the distant canopy leaving almost nothing but silence behind a silence we sometimes pretend to in our largest cathedrals our most ancient and holy dwellings.
The forest, like the sea, is indifferent. We interpret with desperate hope with overweening optimism this indifference as a kind of sacred benevolence, hoping that the trees individually and the forest collectively will somehow bless us and make us fruitful or at any rate successful or if not that at least not dead too soon. It is no accident that some of our earliest gods are the gods of forest and of sea of the vast indifferent forces in and around which we first scrambled out a small living for a moment or two but our gods never perceived us. Our first gods ever so concrete and real and touchable lacked the ability even to notice us to notice our deference our supplication our placatory attempts to weasel out some little favor for ourself or perhaps a similarly short-lived and suspiciously hairless ape which we happened to love for reasons the trees would never, if we could somehow make them see it, understand.
And so it is that we perceive the forest as both sacred and terrifying and eventually also and at the same time mundane. The forest is indifferent and vast and we are imperceptible to it. We are free to worship or to flee or to gather mushrooms for our dinner, and perhaps we will be killed and perhaps eaten by some creature larger and even more violent than ourselves and the forest will not care or even notice. Most likely, though, the mushrooms will be excellent.
Sunday, August 7, 2022
Language, Photography, Cinema, and Gaze
Not too long ago I had the opportunity to revisit the idea that "photography is a language" which it is not. I thought about it some more.
Cinema is a language. At the very least, the way movies are usually made is to assemble the pieces according to a fairly well defined, teachable, system that is very linguistic in character even if it perhaps falls short of some specific definition of "language." The linguistic part isn't the part with the camera, though, it's the part that comes afterwards where the output of the camera is cut together into a movie.
A clip of an actor speaking a line of dialog enjoys much of the same ambiguity a still photograph does. The clip spans time, giving you a taste of before/after in ways that a still does not, but it is nevertheless free floating. Cut that clip together with another actor speaking a response, and make sure the faces are looking in opposite directions, and that eye-lines match, and so on, and abruptly the meaning of the clip is much more nailed down. The character is in conversation with the other character. Continue in the same way for long enough, and you have a movie in which a story is told, relationships are revealed, and so on. Much of that meaning can be imposed after shooting is completed. In extreme cases all the meaning is imposed in the edit.
When we speak of cinema, we speak of these completed objects. These are finished statements, written in a language, which nail down by the use of that language much of the meaning we might make of the film. This is the point of the language of cinema editing. This is why a language has been devised to do this work: because film makers want to nail down the meaning, they want to say coherent, specific, unambiguous things. He said this to her, she shot him in the forehead, and then left through the glass doors, feeling upset and angry. Not everything is nailed down, of course, nothing ever is. But the point is that there is much that is nailed down.
We tend to think of a photograph at least mostly as if it were outside of any context, as free floating. We treat photographs in roughly the way we would think about a single clip of film, before it is edited into a movie.
This is important: It is tempting to apply theory and ideas from cinema to photographs, because they are in some sense the same medium. This is invariably a very bad idea. Film theory applies almost exclusively to the finished product. It is a theory about objects which are linguistic in character, about objects that say things intended by an author (pace Barthes.) Film theory is, if anything, about the ways authors can say things with film, about the ways they cannot say things, about the ways the things the film says are or are not what the author intended.
Photographs are not like that. They are non-linguistic, and most of the meaning we make of a photograph does not arise from the author's intention but rather from what we imagine the author's intentions to have been. There are signs and symbols in a photograph, but for the most part these are not organized into a sentence-like structure which carries meaning. The signs and symbols in a photograph simply are, radiating their ambiguous meanings. The distinction here is something like the difference between literary criticism and etymology.
You can, of course, edit photographs in a way that is analogous to the way we edit movies. This is referred to in modern parlance as "sequencing" and there is no coherent, teachable, school of how that should be done. Advice on sequencing invariably comes out to "print them all out and stick them up where you can look at them. Then shuffle them around until you want to die." You know you're done when you know you're done, objective criteria, or even shared criteria, for done-ness would be considered gauche and a violation of the artist's true expression. You can, of course, apply cinematic methods and produce a sort of stupid "movie" but mostly this isn't what you do. Sequencing, anyway, is largely an art-school affectation with 1000 different flavors, and is thoroughly divorced from photography as a cultural force, as a cultural phenomenon.
The idea of male gaze comes out of the theory of cinema. It is the notion that women and men are commonly presented differently in movies. The women are victims, passive, sexually available, and so on. The men are active, heroic, and so on. You observe these things at the level of "text" in a movie. You can "close read" by counting lines of dialog, you can measure screen time, and so on. You can look narrative structures, etcetera and so forth. You can probably re-task all the techniques of literary analysis to a movie to demonstrate this point, and you discover something real. "Male gaze" is an actual thing in movies.
You cannot meaningfully apply these methods to a photograph, or really even a grouping of photographs.
Re-tasking "gaze" to still photographs is essentially nonsensical. It's like applying differential calculus to dogs. This is why we've ended up with a theory of photographic gaze that is impossible to explain, you can "just see it" and if you can't you "need to do the reading," except that it invariably is just a proxy for the identity of the photographer and how much the critic likes them.
It is notable that Mulvey's original formulation of "male gaze" makes it clear that women can and often do make movies in which "male gaze" is a phenomenon. "Gaze" in Mulvey's formulation, is a well-defined property of a movie, which exists independent of the identity of whoever made the movie. You can basically fill out a spreadsheet for a movie and see how much "male gaze" is in it. You cannot say any of this for the corresponding photographic concept, because the latter is a mess, and it's a mess because "gaze" is an attempt to apply a quasi-literary concept to a medium that isn't even linguistic, let alone literary.
In general, any attempt to apply cinematic theory to still photographs is as doomed as an effort to apply literary criticism to etymological problems, and for exactly the same reasons.
Cinema is a language. At the very least, the way movies are usually made is to assemble the pieces according to a fairly well defined, teachable, system that is very linguistic in character even if it perhaps falls short of some specific definition of "language." The linguistic part isn't the part with the camera, though, it's the part that comes afterwards where the output of the camera is cut together into a movie.
A clip of an actor speaking a line of dialog enjoys much of the same ambiguity a still photograph does. The clip spans time, giving you a taste of before/after in ways that a still does not, but it is nevertheless free floating. Cut that clip together with another actor speaking a response, and make sure the faces are looking in opposite directions, and that eye-lines match, and so on, and abruptly the meaning of the clip is much more nailed down. The character is in conversation with the other character. Continue in the same way for long enough, and you have a movie in which a story is told, relationships are revealed, and so on. Much of that meaning can be imposed after shooting is completed. In extreme cases all the meaning is imposed in the edit.
When we speak of cinema, we speak of these completed objects. These are finished statements, written in a language, which nail down by the use of that language much of the meaning we might make of the film. This is the point of the language of cinema editing. This is why a language has been devised to do this work: because film makers want to nail down the meaning, they want to say coherent, specific, unambiguous things. He said this to her, she shot him in the forehead, and then left through the glass doors, feeling upset and angry. Not everything is nailed down, of course, nothing ever is. But the point is that there is much that is nailed down.
We tend to think of a photograph at least mostly as if it were outside of any context, as free floating. We treat photographs in roughly the way we would think about a single clip of film, before it is edited into a movie.
This is important: It is tempting to apply theory and ideas from cinema to photographs, because they are in some sense the same medium. This is invariably a very bad idea. Film theory applies almost exclusively to the finished product. It is a theory about objects which are linguistic in character, about objects that say things intended by an author (pace Barthes.) Film theory is, if anything, about the ways authors can say things with film, about the ways they cannot say things, about the ways the things the film says are or are not what the author intended.
Photographs are not like that. They are non-linguistic, and most of the meaning we make of a photograph does not arise from the author's intention but rather from what we imagine the author's intentions to have been. There are signs and symbols in a photograph, but for the most part these are not organized into a sentence-like structure which carries meaning. The signs and symbols in a photograph simply are, radiating their ambiguous meanings. The distinction here is something like the difference between literary criticism and etymology.
You can, of course, edit photographs in a way that is analogous to the way we edit movies. This is referred to in modern parlance as "sequencing" and there is no coherent, teachable, school of how that should be done. Advice on sequencing invariably comes out to "print them all out and stick them up where you can look at them. Then shuffle them around until you want to die." You know you're done when you know you're done, objective criteria, or even shared criteria, for done-ness would be considered gauche and a violation of the artist's true expression. You can, of course, apply cinematic methods and produce a sort of stupid "movie" but mostly this isn't what you do. Sequencing, anyway, is largely an art-school affectation with 1000 different flavors, and is thoroughly divorced from photography as a cultural force, as a cultural phenomenon.
The idea of male gaze comes out of the theory of cinema. It is the notion that women and men are commonly presented differently in movies. The women are victims, passive, sexually available, and so on. The men are active, heroic, and so on. You observe these things at the level of "text" in a movie. You can "close read" by counting lines of dialog, you can measure screen time, and so on. You can look narrative structures, etcetera and so forth. You can probably re-task all the techniques of literary analysis to a movie to demonstrate this point, and you discover something real. "Male gaze" is an actual thing in movies.
You cannot meaningfully apply these methods to a photograph, or really even a grouping of photographs.
Re-tasking "gaze" to still photographs is essentially nonsensical. It's like applying differential calculus to dogs. This is why we've ended up with a theory of photographic gaze that is impossible to explain, you can "just see it" and if you can't you "need to do the reading," except that it invariably is just a proxy for the identity of the photographer and how much the critic likes them.
It is notable that Mulvey's original formulation of "male gaze" makes it clear that women can and often do make movies in which "male gaze" is a phenomenon. "Gaze" in Mulvey's formulation, is a well-defined property of a movie, which exists independent of the identity of whoever made the movie. You can basically fill out a spreadsheet for a movie and see how much "male gaze" is in it. You cannot say any of this for the corresponding photographic concept, because the latter is a mess, and it's a mess because "gaze" is an attempt to apply a quasi-literary concept to a medium that isn't even linguistic, let alone literary.
In general, any attempt to apply cinematic theory to still photographs is as doomed as an effort to apply literary criticism to etymological problems, and for exactly the same reasons.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)