May: So much depends on Detail in photography

Homework

To submit four photographs in which your exploration of DETAIL is repeated in such a way that each photograph explores the same notion of detail.

Note:

1- this does not mean that the same exact detail (small "d") is slavishly duplicated, but that your selection of whatever detail you explore in each photo reinforces the same basic story/expression/feeling when the four photographs are viewed together.

2- the balancing act in producing multiple images that explore the same notion (the THING) is to select DETAIL that expresses that notion repetitively but not identically. Remember that Goldchain focussed on his face but changed it as much as he could. Similarly, Brassai shot Paris-at-night but alway from a new vantage point.

3- the key is to have the detail that expresses your "notion" clearly in mind and then "see" it in the viewfinder in different ways...

You should scroll down to Extras 2 to read some background information on this assignment.
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The photographer was tied to the facts of things, and it was his problem to force the facts to tell the truth, He could not outside the studio, pose the truth, he could only record it as he found it, and it was found in nature in a fragmented and unexplained form – not as a story, but as scattered and suggestive clues. The photographer could not assemble these clues into a coherent narrative, he could only isolate the fragment, document it, and by so doing claim for it some special significance, a meaning which went beyond simple description. The compelling clarity with which a photograph recorded the trivial suggested that the subject had never before been properly seen, that it was in fact perhaps not trivial, but filled with undiscovered meaning. If photographs could not be read as stories, they could be read as symbols.

The Photographer's Eye. John Szarkowski

Detail wags ddog.

Last Sunday at the Saltspring Library the photography seminar that we call 'Doors on Perception' examined yet another of John Szarkowski's aspects of art photography. We have previously identified that the camera's salient characteristic is that it is tied to the 'real': we take from the world of things rather than create them with brush and paint. Now we make the next step and consider that out of the mass of possible things we must make a selection. That thing we select, Szarkowski calls the detail and he rightly says that this selection is a crucial step. It really does wag the dog of any future steps along the way towards the finished photograph.

This idea of the detail, once we think about it, is pretty obvious and is found in other forms besides photography: the essay, poem or factual report we write, the story we tell, selects certain details and suppresses others, the music we compose chooses some elements from a vast repertoire and lays them out in a time sequence, the choreographer finds the right steps and puts them in a certain expressive order and so on.

So, selection goes along with the form we place the detail within and this leads to the final print. The print is not just a slice of reality but is a new reality combining the detail with the photographer's ideas about it. It becomes a work of art. Any photograph, art or not, benefits from an understanding that selection and organization makes for better communication. The final product of this process is not simply “ a sunset” but is a new thing that communicates the idea of sunset, an important difference that individuals often never notice in their photographic work.

Rather than re-present my illustrated talk on detail from a Szarkowskian perspective I will combine my basic 'translation' of his detail ( see quote above) with a discussion about 'aesthetics' as an introduction to Simon's presentation of aesthetics in photography. In the class I used W.C. William's 'Red Wheelbarrow' and here I refer to Keat's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'.

The word 'Aesthetic' was coined in the 18^th century by Winkelmann in his examination of Classical Greek and Roman art. He said that style was determined by culture, that the philosophical views of Plato and Aristotle about art came out of a specific society. Others such as Kant, who examined the relationship of viewer and viewed that formed the aesthetic response, and Hegel, who emphasized the connection between art and religion and the evolution of style, enlarged our present understanding. Hegel wrote that artistic expression symbolized an idea, and could be understood in a rational way as being representative of the broader culture. Discussion about art, beauty and truth has a long history and I'm sure it is not all written yet. Each of us has his own ideas and they influence our photography; when we raise our camera we have a lot of ideas underlying our choice of detail and how we present it.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty” - that is all ye know on Earth and all ye need to know. John Keats

The Detail.

Szarkowski presents us with a series of 'slices' through the tradition of photography. He identifies the salient quality of a photograph as the 'thing itself', - the actual representation, the take, from the world of things that surround us. An aspect of this take is the next slice we will be examining - the detail. Once again the concept of detail seems as obvious as it did for 'the thing'. We swing our camera around until we find a detail we like, and then 'click', right? And yes, that is right, but the devil is hidden within the details and that is where things get interesting.

The world outside the studio, where things can be arranged and results predicted, is presented to us in fragmented form, a swirl of sense impressions, a jumble of information. How do we find the details within this that will present a clear 'message'? How do we select, isolate and document some truth from the fragments of meaning? As Szarkowski puts it, “ [ the photographer's problem was] to force the facts to tell the truth”. By selecting and documenting specific details we present them with heightened meaning. Look at this, see it, we are saying; this has an importance and a value that you may have missed. The photograph stands for something ( a thought, idea, feeling), it is a symbol that we must read in a visual way.

When I make a photograph of Spring blossoms it has an underlying symbolic value; renewal, rebirth, another beginning of another precious season of growth and its promise of fulfillment. Any photograph of blossom will do this for the viewer, we all understand symbolism whether we name it as such or not, but my job is to make this as clear as possible, by carefully selecting specific details and presenting them in a compelling manner. It would be tidy if this could be completely rational, a simple matter of rule-driven craftsmanship, but as much of the effectiveness of any visual image is its emotional impact and as emotions are by definition not rational, we do need to work with our intuitive sense even as we make technical camera decisions. It is the close partnership between the intuitive and the rational that underlies all

creative work.

 When I decide to raise my sights through the viewfinder so as to slice off the rocky foreground, I am trimming out irrelevant detail. When I center the blossoming tree and place the distant island as a horizontal I have created a cross, and Easter, in the Christian tradition has grafted the cross and the resurrection onto Spring. I have suggested that the detail may be symbolic of a larger truth.

A few weeks ago the last snow of winter was melting fast and the rain had pelted down for days; every surface of my hillside property was filmed with moving water and the little seasonal stream in a fold of the landscape gathered it all up and shot it downhill. My camera and I were searching for the detail that would express this flow. My first image was the obvious detail, the stream itself, and much irrelevant information was excluded in order to express its sinuous line from top to bottom of the vertical format I had chosen to use.

A technically adequate image, it presented a documentary description. It was time to move closer, both physically and emotionally.

The most obvious part of the stream was the falls, so following Robert Capa’s dictum “ If your pictures aren't good enough you're not close enough.” I splashed my way through my subject matter and began photographing the point of transition where horizontal flow became the vertical of the falls. Surely this was the significant detail that Szarkowski was writing about? I even twisted my camera deliberately so the important line of the fall's lip was a strong diagonal to emphasis the dramatic gesture. Somehow though, interesting and unique as this was, I was not satisfied and moved to make a simple frontal photograph of the falls, intuitively making one important adjustment to my camera settings: I purposely underexposed to darken all but the flash of light that was the falling water. The result, in monochrome as I had pre-visualized it, expressed for me, a truth, “ a meaning that went beyond simple description”. The narrative was that of 'Spring run-off' but the photographs taken that day were selected details, to express the visual reality, both from documentary and expressive points of view.

Aesthetics

One aspect that Szarkowski emphases in this section on Detail is the idea that we as photographers are concerned with 'telling the truth' by finding the right detail to express that in symbolic form. What truth does he have in mind do we think? Is it simply reality? And where does the idea that truth is of any concern to the arts come from? Are the arts concerned solely with the beautiful? When we talk about aesthetics what do we mean?

There is a poem by John Keats called 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' http://www.victorianweb.org/previctorian/keats/urn.text.html which talks about this idea of truth and its relationship with beauty. Much of the ideas we carry around with us as we take art photographs were first written down at the time of the ancient Greeks, of classical Athens and it famous philosophers. Ideas about beauty being most fully expressed through nature; that balance and proportion and clarity of colour or light were important; that truth and beauty were inextricably linked and were the twin faces of ultimate reality. Every time we use our camera we have this set of long accepted ideas guiding our viewfinder. Somehow, a truth is best expressed, we think, within certain visual patterns. Even when we break the pattern it is in relationship to that norm.

Keats writes a poem about a piece of ancient Greek statuary from the Elgin marbles that has a picture carved into it of a wedding feast: the procession, the music, the bride and groom, all frozen in the moment, just as our photographs do. He has presented us with a carefully selected set of details to make his point - that beauty and truth are expressions of the same thing. So, the urn expresses eternal truth and beauty, but then so too does his poem, carefully created within a poetic form every bit as constrained as the stone and the shape of the urn itself. So our photograph which can freeze a moment in time and select some relevant details from among the many can also be an expression of truth and as long as it may last we will feel it as beauty.

When we think about aesthetics, we are working within an ancient set of standards and when we stray from these we need to have a rationale for doing so, - another aesthetic. One such aesthetic enunciated long ago as the Dionysian and again in the more recent past at the time of Keats, was the idea of the sublime, which was about the uncontrollably dramatic aspects of nature, the great storms, majestic mountains, the universe itself and the personal expression of mood and feeling. Here we can understand that balance, clarity and symmetry are not necessarily appropriate, but that awe inspiring natural phenomena and grand passions or psychological states call for a more passionate, dynamic and unrestrained expression. So, here is another way of designing our imagery so that dramatic things are not necessarily presented in a calm and balanced sort of way. We are free then to work within another set of ideas. The history of the arts is one of the invention and expression of ideas, of aesthetics.

As an example of old ideas clothed in a new aesthetic consider Edward Weston's nature photographs and his assertion that the photographer should be 'invisible'. The Greeks wrote that Nature was the only true beauty and that created art ( artifice) came second. The Renaissance repeated this dictum. So Weston uses his camera, this dispassionate machine, to present Nature directly as a way of bypassing the whole tradition of artist and picture making. In this aesthetic, his camera imagery is closer to the truth of nature.

These perennial aesthetics that put so much emphasis on balance, proportion and clarity may also live on in people's minds though time simply because our brains are hard wired, just as were those of the ancient Greeks or our more distant ancestors, to seek, find and create meaningful patterns. We ourselves are bi-symmetrical, we see balance and proportion in nature and it supplies a sense of order and predictability. Music seems to be well established in our brain structure, probably predating language itself, and our visual cortex is huge and performs activities far more complex than simply processing what we actually see. We visualize, we dream, we express and make art.

The opposing aesthetic, that of the sublime, is also part of our human nature and of nature in the whole. Photographs that stress individual personal expression, mood and feeling, and may do this through asymmetrical and highly dramatic subject matter and technique are legitimately following that aesthetic.

We must remember however that perfectly balanced and perfectly proportioned photographs have a certain repetitive boring quality if that is all they are doing. Balance must be for a reason, have something to say within the inner logic of the picture. The sublime, pushed far towards the expression of highly individual feelings, revved to the max, can become boring too. It is often in skating near the edges, playing with balance and proportion or seeing how far one can push the sublime before chaos ensues that we find new expression.

So, all those fragments, all those details we are searching for amid the many are the raw material for our photography. We must find, as Szarkowski says, some “undiscovered meaning” within them and express it with our camera through the detail it captures so well.

Simon's presentation.

We are pretty familiar by now with the three 'doors on perception' format of this seminar series. Bill presents Szarkowski's modernist ideas and tries to keep his focus on the craft aspects, Simon presents the aesthetics of Art photography that rest upon craft, and Greg presents post-modern photographers whose imagery rests uncomfortably upon modernism and is an extension of or a reaction to it depending on your point of view.

In this examination of Detail, Simon has shown us a series of his own photographs http://www.simonhenson.ca/ where it is possible to see how a good technical photograph can go several steps beyond craft 'rules'. His use of design and other aesthetics take the capture of the detail into his own personal expression and window to the world. Here are the images we all can relate to and can achieve through learning to SEE and learning to EXPRESS.

He also pointed out the futility of asking other amateur photographers to critique in the superficial manner of the “ If it were my image, I would crop it thus", or "I would do it this way” variety. We are all individuals and have our own personal take on the world, our own aesthetic; there is no external 'gold standard' against which to measure our personal imagery or that of others. By constantly checking with others we may simply be seeking a sense of companionship within a group, rather than advancing on our own individual path of discovery.

Greg's presentation

Greg presents us with some powerful imagery that pushes Szarkowski into the corner as far as 'detail' is concerned. Detail here is a broader concept than simply selecting something meaningful from `life` as Weston would say.

One powerful set of images shows the photographer as his own subject, a self portrait that is, through careful make-up and props, a record of his relatives, lost during the Holocaust. We look, we see, we understand, We are moved to tears. Probably then, don’t you think, this collection is a work of art? http://lenscratch.com/2012/09/rafael-goldchain/

Another set of images show night scenes of Paris, the common detail is simple, they are all shot at night. http://www.atgetphotography.com/The-Photographers/BRASSAI.html

A set of almost nightmarishly fractured and assembled images show one thing, one detail, in common, the photographer's dislike of humanity.

http://www.dominicrouse.com/

Some of these present detail more as something that is self expressive, less tied to the actual, closer to the concept of the sublime, but Szarkowski, while tied to the 'real world' still emphasizes “the meaning that went beyond simple description”so perhaps there is really less of a separation between modernism and post-modernism than would appear on the surface. Choosing the detail, however we individually conceive it, is crucial; it is where the camera meets our mind.

Extra 1

The red Wheelbarrow

So much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

William Carlos Williams

This is the poem with which I chose to begin a lecture about Detail in photography. Perhaps, I thought, if the idea was first presented in another medium, words not pictures, it would remove some of the perceived difficulty associated with thinking about the relationship between what we photograph and how we present it in its final state.

The words express a seemingly simple detail in a very short form; we receive a mental picture instantly. One way it could have been presented would have been in one simple sentence: “So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow, glazed with rainwater, beside the white chickens.” but then, the poet chose another form, a tall thin one, to lay it out. And what's with “ so much depends...”what does he mean exactly, or even inexactly? Why put that in? We are launched into a journey where we must engage with the poem, we must put in some effort of our own imagination and the final result will be a composite of us and the poem. Interesting, but surely this is more complex than ignoring the poem and going straight to photography?

In photography, so much depends on what detail we choose to select from the bewildering world of things. Most photographs lack a clear subject, do not have much to express and rely on words to explain them; think of your average travel photo where it seems that talking about is the main purpose anyway. In this poem the image is precise and very visual and so that leaves us with asking what was the purpose of the poet and why this particular vertical format?

Perhaps the subject is about things, or even colours, in rain; so much depends on the light during rain, everything has a special glow, a special varnished glazed look. Is this about the act of observation itself then, or how we perceive reality? If so it is the central most important act of a photographer, that of observation, of recognizing important detail, before the camera can record it.

And that vertical form the poet has chosen; surely not to be cute or stylish but to tell us something more if we are prepared to think a little. It look like rain to me, lots of drops, arranged in little V shaped arrows and falling as the details emerge, as we read or drop our eyes to the bottom of the page. Now that is clever, I love this poem, not simply for the 'nice' picture but for the way it has been presented.

And how come I am such a smarty pants? Because I do this all the time when I am photographing. I am thinking about the appropriate detail, but the thrill for me is not the specific subject but the compositional challenges that present themselves. Like Mr. Williams, I choose my subject matter for its design possibilities rather than its own pretty gotcha qualities. Like this photo looking into the sunlight reflected on the water: the sparking sea is framed by two V's of trees that I observed and that forms the structure of the image. But it is what this structure performs, what it expresses, that is important, and that has to do with my feeling for the gesture, how our eyes are channeled by the main V, carried forward and upward along the thin lines of the arbutus and contained within the light by the distant island. The photograph itself is opening like a flower to the light, and so much depends on that.

So, to get back to my first problem, which really has to do with how one gets from choosing detail and passing through design to the finished image. We have a clue or two about how William Carlos Williams worked out his beautiful poem and can now see that much of the beauty we feel originates in the structure, in the poem itself, rather than simply in the subject matter; there are lots of rain and chickens and wheelbarrows in the world. It is easy to see that this is a poem and not some transparent medium that acts as a carrier for a picture. We are made aware ( at least we are by this point) of the concrete poem by its obvious structural qualities. It is a new thing on the block and we react to it as a work of art. It has form and something to say. How many of the photographs we see can that be said of? How many are merely transparent carriers of some sunset or other rather than objects in their own right? How many images are eye candy, nothing more? The following quote opens a way of conceiving of photography as a way of thinking. Are works of art really thoughts in visual form?

Images seem to speak to the eye, but they are really addressing the mind. They are ways of thinking in the guise of ways of seeing. The eye can sometimes be satisfied with form alone, but the mind can only be satisfied with meaning ....

Wilson Duff. 'Masks of the NW coast.'

I think he has something there, don't you? It is the meaning that we engage with in the Red Wheelbarrow, via the imagery and the structure of the poem. It is meaning that comes out of the brilliant light reflected and contained in my photograph.

Extra 2 
From Greg ( Notice that this material is important background to this month's homework.)

Greg on Detail:
Some of you seemed a bit confused at the end our the last seminar series as to what the notion of detail actually entailed, so here is a bit of a Greg-centric reprise:
In Szarkowski's world (and to be fair, for the most part in ours as well) the notion of the detail ties into the larger notion of the thing itself by the realization - less true now than it may have been in Szarkowski's time - that:
1 - there is a fundamental difference between photography and the other visual arts. That difference expresses itself in the "fact" (in brackets because I believe that it's 'factness" is, in fact, in question) that photographers, according to Szarkowski, are limited to SELECTING from the external world rather than just creating what they want. Hence the insistence that photographers TAKE (select) where other visual artists MAKE.
2 - this recognition logically leads photographers to find ways (apparently unique to photography) of making those selections that will lead to an image that conveys clearly and meaningfully what the photographer is trying to convey to his/her audience. The DETAIL is the first such element, according to Szarkowski, in the photographers arsenal.
Thus, the focus on DETAIL is the photographers way - since (s)he is not able to just 'paint' in or out the relevant elements of an image - of focussing the audiences attention on that which (s)he thinks is most important: THE THING ITSELF. And - by way of giving part of the story away - the subsequent sections of his book (frame, light, vantage point) are each important means of achieving that goal.
So the DETAIL is that which carries the story to the audience. And the formal elements of design, the composition (including choices of ISO, exposure, depth of field, lens type, etc), the choice of framing, lighting and vantage point are all tools in our arsenal to make the relevant detail(s) of an image-as-we-see-it visible and understandable to our audience.
Now, because there is always - always - the question in our mind as audience of whether the photographic artist actually meant to 'say' what we think we see (unlike painting or sculpture where there can be no question of what you see is what you get), we need some way of determining for ourselves - in the absence of the artist - whether what we think we see in indeed a relevant detail. That is where REPETITION comes in. If we, as photographic artist, repeat our
decision process (our choice of detail) in a series of images, then we can let our audience know, without being there, what we are trying to communicate.
Repetition is one element that Szarkowski does not address in his book, but it is one that has become crucial to photographic artists in communicating their vision to audiences (in fact, it has become expected of us to a large degree). The result of such repetition - not 
to be mistaken with slavish duplication - is the BODY OF WORK.

Extra 3

Photojournalism

'Pilgrimage' by Annie Leibovitz

Pilgrimage was a restorative project for Leibovitz and the arc of the narrative is her own. “ From the beginning, when I watched my children stand mesmerized over Niagara Falls, it was an exercise in renewal,” she says. ”It taught me to see again.”

This photo book is in our Saltspring Library and is a reminder for me that Art photography, about which we are presently engaged in this seminar series, is only one branch of photographic expression and that the photojournalist Annie Leibovitz can, through her writing and photography move us even as she informs us.

As some of my own work with a camera is in the same genre, this book has much to teach me. As she writes, this book was an exercise in renewal and it taught her to see again. Who could ask for anything more?

Because we are involved in Art photography it is necessary to think of using the camera as artistic expression and that legitimately requires some time spent in the realm of aesthetics; in examining ours and others works within the perspective of isms, - modernism and post modernism - and that can become quite heavy going, especially as the deeper one digs the less these classifications seem to hold together. Think about Impressionism and post Impressionism, those stylistic categories we are familiar with and where we can pigeonhole artists like Monet and Cezanne. Turns out that even here categorization can lead to dangerous oversimplification and incorrect understanding. The worst thing is when we think we know and yet we do not.

 It is refreshing to take a break to look, read, and explore the content of Leibovitz' imagery and and her written text and not ponder the formal aspects that are present in her photographs. The trouble is of course that once one begins to notice how photographs are designed, it can be difficult not to notice, - that becomes part of the process of looking and seeing.

Extra 4

The assignment revisited.

I was photographing the rhododendron that is in full bloom beside our stream the other day, drawn by the sheer uncomplicated beauty of its Spring display amid the green of the forest and stream. I knew I had to write about this experience for my main Dragongate blog and took photographs to show the reality beside the narrative I would soon be writing. http://gardheim.blogspot.ca/2014/05/transcendentally-speaking.html These are, I think, expressive and technically adequate photographs and they blend with and amplify the written text. They might even fit into the homework assignment facing the class, that of producing four images that share a particular detail; in this case they are all variations on the detail 'Rhododendron'. For me though, they express another less obvious 'detail' that I found expressed in Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem 'Rhodora'.( an aesthetic, by the way)

...if eyes were made for seeing,

Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;

When it came time to take these photographs, I was not simply satisfied to take a photograph of the whole bush but sought some details that combined blossoms ( the most important detail of the bush) with its environment. I felt that my first take was a true one, pink blossom set against green, and the challenge was to find ways to express this transient beauty through careful design.

Just to supply another very different take on this 'Detail times 4' assignment, here is something I have taken out of someone's ( Annie Leibovitz') book, literally. I have photographed, already printed pages of photographs of someones sculptured landscape assemblage, and my contribution is that the actual curves of the pages make for new and altered images. This is a long way from Szarkowski's modernist ideas of what makes a photograph, but does open up a lot of possibilities when you are planning your own series.

Extra 5

Cameron was interested in personalities, stories, relationships. Ansel Adam's photographs are exactly the opposite. The story for him is about a pristine, uninhabited place.

'Pilgrimage' Annie Leibovitz

Thought you might like this quote, especially if you are uncertain about your approach to the assignment. Cameron was a Victorian portrait photographer who specialized in soft focus. As the quote points out, she followed her interests and photographed from that perspective, as did Ansel Adams with his pre-visualization. Our job as people is to be ourselves and let our photography reflect us, not some ideal proposed by others. This course focuses on that idea, presenting a number of perspectives but hopefully not being prescriptive about any one in particular.