Wednesday, September 17, 2014



September: Time.

A slower shutter speed permits camera movement, purposeful blur, to express thematic ideas.


A little cooler in the library conference room this last Sunday, and about time too, now we are into September! And the topic, coincidentally, was Time.
I presented Szarkowski's ideas about this peculiarly important aspect of photography - painting, for instance, may portray time too, but lacks that calibrated snatch of time performed by the shutter - that 'decisive moment'.

Hopper

Simon showed us a set of his own well crafted photographs that showed us that time may simply be about shutter speed but in the larger scale of things can be about longer seasonal records, the repeated subject though the year. I think we all wished in this section to emphasis that time can be both a technical camera subject and a thematic exploration. We use shutter speed not simply to freeze motion or slow it down but as a tool for expressing more subtle and complex ideas.

Greg, in his role of lifting the roof off Szarkowski's modernist agenda showed us four photographers ( Wall, et al.) whose works questioned the basic framework of photographic dogma. Is this a photograph really, even if it is made using a camera? How far can we stretch our minds, and do we really want to? Remember, the title of this series of lectures is 'doors on perception', and here are some interesting and challenging views into an alternate universe. We look and question, and that is partially the point the artist is leading us to.

Homework. For next month make/take a photograph that for you best shows your reaction to 'time'. Keep an open mind. Good luck!

Time
I read about Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies, with the calibrated backdrops and multiple cameras with stereographic lenses that revealed the position of, for instance, a horse's feet in mid gallop. And about Harold Egerton's development of the strobe and his photographs of events that couldn’t be seen by the naked eye ­ a bullet passing through an apple or a playing card, a humming bird hovering. They were great moments in photography. Feats. And the photographs were beautiful. That galloping horse and Edgerton's photograph of a bullet slicing the Queen of Hearts in half are romantic pictures. Poets took those pictures.
'At Work' Annie Leibovitz

We have been working our way through photography as delineated by John Szarkowski jnevins.com/szarkowskireading.htm in his influential book 'The Photographer's Eye' and an interesting journey it has been, if only because he has challenged a number of cherished beliefs and created some more of his own. Having defined qualities that are unique to photography as opposed to the other visual arts: the tie to reality ( the thing itself, we take, not make), the selection of telling details from the mass of 'things', and the framing that includes some things and excludes others and in the process creates a separate selected version of 'reality'. Today we turn to another interesting quality unique to photography, that of 'time' and particularly the 'decisive moment' * when the camera records the image. As we will see, this business of time has been used by photographers in many different ways. Behind any photograph lies the mind of the maker and the ideas that drive it.

Szarkowski begins by stating that there is no such thing as an instantaneous photograph. Be it ever so obviously long, as in a time exposure, or encompassing just a millisecond as a bullet passes by, there is a segment of time involved. Furthermore, much of the interest of photography lies in its ability to record and thus preserve a moment in time: consider your own photo albums. Much of the usefulness of photographic documentation lies in its future. We have a sense of present continuity partly because we can sense our past trajectory. We sample the past, our waypoints, to plot our present course and project our future. As in Gauguin”s famous painting we ask 'Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? ' and our camera provides a record, if not a definitive answer.


Today we also struggle with the same prosaic problems that beset early photographers; the struggling baby creates a blurred image, the passing vehicle does the same, as does the wave breaking upon the shore. Nowadays we have the potential to shoot within a wide range of shutter speeds. We can make informed choices of suitable speeds of exposure and of course we can adjust our iso sensitivity to permit combinations of shutter and aperture that suit our purposes. The history of photography has been one of seeking to speed things up and the accidentally blurred images of the past have been pretty much consigned to the dustbin.

The development of faster lens, shutters and films lead to a horse race of sorts. Who could claim to make 'instantaneous' photographs in the portrait studios? What does reality look like when recorded at high speed; a speed faster the a 'blink of the eye'? 'Verry interesting' was the general reaction in a science minded age. Enter Eadweard Muybridge, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge a man with both a photographic mission and a colourful personal history. By 1878, using calibrated backdrops and multiple stereographic cameras he was able to capture movement faster than the human eye – the galloping horse being the most famous example.



Another way of capturing very short slices of time was through the use of flash and strobe technology. Harold Egerton en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Eugene_Edgerton stopped a speeding bullet using a strobe, but we can all experience a version of this phenomenon with just our on-camera flash that freezes motion.


 Photographers discovered that these frozen moments held a special and hitherto unseen beauty. The fleeting expressions of the human face, the lines and shapes that now could be observed and reacted to in the photograph, were all instrumental in defining the particular niche that photography now occupies and Szarkowski described. The other visual arts now regularly use 'camera reality' - it has become the way we see the world -, just as concepts of the visual arts in general find expression in photography in a post modernist world view.



Today, fast time exposure still provides a real fascination, but slow speeds and blurred images too have been recognized to have their own special potential. We do not need to belong to one camp or the other but can choose the form of expression that suits our ideas and the subject matter we choose. We have a tool kit that encompasses both and can put our energy into the expression of our ideas about the world around us. Time, it turns out, is bigger than concerns around camera speed, it is a fascinating and all-absorbing area of study in its own right.


  • *The 'decisive moment' is associated with Henri Cartier Bresson, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Cartier-Bresson and while we know that he is describing the time between the opening and closing of the shutter, what we take from it is still open for us all to work out individually. It is more a sense of why we take photographs and what we choose to capture. He once wrote “"To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.".




Extra 1

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's ( or thing's ) mortality, mutability, precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, All photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
Susan Sontag.

While it is easy to grasp that photography performs the function of documentation - every photograph instantly becomes a record of the past – I found that the series of photographs I shot on the ferry to illustrate shutter speed took on another aspect that Einstein himself would have found 'relatively' interesting.

 Photographing the ferry's bow wave from the deck high above showed an aspect that Szarkowski calls our attention to: that the camera presents us, especially at high or low shutter speeds with a way of seeing that is foreign to our normal perception. The foaming first fold of the ferry wave looks different, supplies us with alternate slices and ways of understanding,and opens the door to conceptual thoughts about waves, time and space. Not every art photograph echoes painting, science is also brother to the arts, and religion too has long been closely tied to the arts. All are ways of speculating about the nature of reality and our human place within it.



A book in the library ( 'The Oldest Living Things in the World') by a celebrated photographer, Rachael Sussman is a record of the oldest living things. She has developed a concept and parameters – the subjects must be at least two thousand years old – and then produced a body of work and presented it in book form with written commentary. 





Now, this seems like science where a camera has been used for documentation, or perhaps a literary work with illustrations, but it is photographic art precisely because she claims it to be, has conceptualized it.  Conceptual art such as Greg has presented us with opens a wide door into the nature of perception and the role of photography in exploring it.








I began this series of shutter speed images with two shots: one, a long view up the harbour from the moving ferry where all is in sharp focus because the subject is far away and any motion (by ferry or waves) is in line with the camera's direction. There is little or no lateral movement. The second, taken with the same settings a second later points down from the upper deck at the bow wave of the ferry, The water surface is closer and is in relative motion to the ferry, ( we see the streaks) and the bow wave is in lateral movement to the camera. Major blur, but interesting visually. The ferry of course, despite being in motion, is sharp because the camera moves with it. Szarkowski makes his major point about Time when he says that the ability of the camera to capture both slow and fast exposures opens a world of beauty and interest for photographers, be it the fleeting expressions of the human face or a speeding bullet ( or the changing and yet continuous form of a ferry wave).





Extra 2

While we get very concerned about stopping accidental blur from either camera or subject motion there are old and familiar ways of reducing the accidental 'fault'. One, as mentioned above, is to shoot in the line of motion, another is to ask our human subject to “hold that pose”thus freeing us to concentrate on depth of field or other concerns. Sometimes we can time our shot to catch our subject at the peak of action, - the diver pauses on the spring board just before the dive.
Last winter I published a Dragongate blog article about Time. You will find it atgardheim.blogspot.ca/2013/12/time-in-photography-view-into-nature-of.html

Extra 3



November's topic will be 'Vantage point' and will also be the last Szarkowski topic we will deal with in our year-long study of art photography. Not that there is not much more to learn about, but that has been our chosen focus for this seminar series.

'Vantage point' is a recognition that the camera takes a photograph from the world of things and because of that advantage/constraint often captures and presents us with an unusual angle or perspective. This seemingly arbitrary and challenging capture is more typical of a photograph than a painting and presents new ways of seeing and understanding the world around us.

We will be examining Szarkowski's modernist perspective: how people grew to accept the camera's 'take' on the world and how it came to influence other branches of the arts. How it came to influence other photographers as well. He writes that “ An artist is a man who seeks new structures in which to order and simplify his sense of the reality of life.” and concludes by pointing out that the photographer works within the context of all photography that surrounds and has gone before him.




Anyway, it should be interesting for me to wander around and seek to understand and illustrate this idea of 'Vantage Point' while you all are working with Time. :)

Extra 4 Life lessons.
We weren't taught techniques so much as attitude. I didn’t know what the teachers were doing at the time, but later I realized that it was life lessons they were teaching: how to be a person. That kind of instruction stays with you for a lifetime.
'The world of Rosome textiles of Japan' Betsy Sterling Benjamin

When I sit down with my Grandchildren to paint and draw I am aware that I am teaching attitude: here is this adult making pictures with so much focus and dedication. Attitude is the core lesson, not how to hold your brush or mix the paints.

For a teacher in North America there is basically one familiar lesson type and that ends up being some version of 'how-to', but the teachers who's influence remains with us throughout our lives are those who presented their passion for their subject and seemed to us to be genuine human beings. In this quote it seems that in Japan the emphasis is more on these intangible influences rather than 'technique' in isolation from our personal development.

When we study photography we naturally seek technique, a set of 'how to's ' so that we can succeed at the assignment. What then, if we recognized that our real assignment is ourselves? 


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