Doors on Perception

July. The frame

Homework.

Take a picture - any picture - in  the way you would normally do...

...then re-frame the picture in a manner similar to that described by Simon.

Do so in a way that changes the feel of the image.

Present both the original and the altered image.

The meeting was somewhat sparsely attended on Sunday, The day was hot and the final football game in Brazil was being played out. Too bad, as the FRAME was an important concept to add to our bag of tricks as photographers. I presented both Szarkowski's 'frame' ideas and expanded them into a broader context of the visual arts than he would have cheerfully accepted. His role as curator of an exhibition of American photographers of a certain sort lead him to stress the differences between photography as he saw it and the visual arts in general and his ideas were influential for many years and still have much merit. However, to cut ourselves off from thousands of years of fellow image makers and what they have to offer us seems to me to be an unnecessary stretch and hence much of my lecture showed the common relationship with painting and sculpture. The brush, for example, is a tool which can be used for many things besides art, as can the camera. It is not the tool used that is ultimately important but the ideas being expressed by the maker of images.

Simon, in his presentation, used his own photographs to discuss the practical and specific problems that we all face when framing, specifically how cropping an image in different ways can alter the 'message' and how when we take a photograph we are selecting significant detail and presenting it within a frame. ( See the homework assignment above) His photography, as usual was both splendid and instructive.

Greg branched away this time from presenting the works of interesting and original photographers from the past and present and showed us his own work ( He will be having a showing of his work at Artspring this Fall) He emphasized how the frame is not simply a design devise but 'frames' our ideas as well, be they a product of the intellect or our emotions. The things of the world, their relevant details and how we frame them are at heart ideas that we dress and present in visual form.

The Frame.   First the Lasso and then the Corral.

At last, we think, this we already know about: an attractive but dangerous assumption. Framing, we think, is something the camera does for us either through the viewfinder or, more recently, on the L.E.D. screen on the back of the camera. We are selecting the detail that interests us: we lasso it and carefully place it within a corral while at the same time sorting its contents out into a set of relationships. And that is what the frame does: as Szarkowski says, “ [The frame] created a relationship... that had not been there before.” There is the wide open Prairie, the cattle are lowing and here is the corral all set up today for branding and it is filled with bawling calves. The corral separates the particular from the general and we are invited to focus our attention on what is happening within those wooden walls. Our Frame.

Framing is not just a concern of photographers, all art has done this for thousands of years. When we look at cave paintings or carvings from ten to fifty thousand years ago in Europe we see a natural form of framing: the cave wall or roof provides the limited surface, or a projecting shape suggests a form that the artist completes in clay or paint. When we today photograph a portion of these ancient scenes however, we are interfering with the context. Our frame can make a lie or refine and identify a truth; its all in how we use it.

What is in and what is out of the frame, and what is going on inside it is the history of art, not only of Europe, but in cultures all around the world. Photography has had a double desire: to declare itself to be part of that long tradition, not simply a mechanical set of operations, and yet to carve out its own special set of qualities. Szarkowki in his book has his own description that incorporates the traditions of the visual arts and yet sets out his modernist ideas about photography as a unique art form.

He describes the photographers 'take' on the world as being like a scroll painting, an endless roll of phenomena from which one makes selections. The photographer draws a line around and directs our attention to a specific area of interest. The two dimensional shape thus created is then a separate thing and is no longer part of the original real world. We must understand it according to its own context. To extend my corral metaphor, we have a bunch of calves within the fence and it is up to us to organize them. The success of our organization within the frame depends on our compositional skills and they determine what the end product will be; a good days work or mayhem; an expressive communication or one that fails to some degree or other. The frame is the all-important organizational device. As Szarkowski writes:

The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge – the line that separates in from out – and on the shapes that are created by it.

Within the frame, the captured detail must relate to itself, not to something excluded by the frame and outside of what we can see. Like a stage set with its actors, stage props and painted backdrop we must work within the artificial boundaries we have created.

 Here there be cows but no corral. The frame leads us to
 be aware of how the herd actually extends beyond the frame.
( James Wyeth painting)
A photograph can, however, indicate the larger context by carefully choosing and cutting off bits of detail around the edges. This might seem simply sloppy cropping but it is a powerful way of indicating the larger context outside the frame and this was picked up and used by painters when photographs first appeared on the scene.

Photography was invented during a period of rapid change in the art world centered in Paris in mid to late 19^th century Europe. The chemistry that enabled it was but part of a larger interest in science; in optics, light and in colour theory. Also, influences from around the world, be they 'primitive' cultural artifacts or the latest imported Japanese woodcut prints, were stirring things up. All those recent black and white photographs were adding to the mix and a 'modern' artist recognized the possibilities within this new view on the world of things. Why would one not use a photograph of one's model rather than pay by the hour to draw from life and what possible new poses were available for the relatively short time needed to expose a photograph? What about the framing that in so many photographic images was interestingly arbitrary and awkward by 'painting standards'? That immediate frozen moment cut out of the scene was novel and gave a sense of action, of reality. Degas himself was an avid amateur photographer and he used 'camera reality' within his paintings. The black and white of photography and casual 'snapshot' poses in avant garde paintings of the time reflected the eye of the camera. From then on the visual arts and photography, melded, not just in technical ways but in the conceptualizing minds of the practitioners.

Degas 

We have seen that the camera selects rather than creates, it is limited to the real , it must choose certain details and suppress others; and finally that the frame performs a double function: it determines what we are looking at and how that is presented. It cuts out a piece of reality, works out the relationships within its boundaries and becomes a new thing in the world, no longer a three dimensional reality but a new two dimensional one created by the photographer.

Extras.

Note that the 'confused jumble' of plastic
 has been carefully arranged. 

Extra 1.The doll, versions 1&2.

I took these two photos to illustrate the 'Frame' and to introduce some of the main points I would be presenting in my lecture.

1. A doll is a stand in, a symbol, for a person and here she is, alone and adrift in a dark world. She is immersed and framed in darkness like an actor on a darkened stage.
2. Same doll, same pose, very different environment: she is brightly lit and surrounded by a jumble of plastic puzzle pieces. She is framed by them and yet we feel that they extend beyond the frame we have chosen.

These represent two different ideas about the frame: the traditional one where the image is thought of as being in a stage set or box in which the act takes place, and the second, like a Degas painting, where the frame tells us that we have simply frozen a piece of reality in mid flight.

The frame in both photos is both functional in the Szarkowskian technical way of separating in from out ( see the quote in the above essay) and in a conceptual way. By enclosing the doll in a frame I am asking the viewer to feel the doll's life, her isolation, both in the darkness and perhaps even more so amid the glitz and confusion of a busy life. The frame is important in what it contains and in what it leaves out. It is an instrument of visual communication.

Extra 2

I introduced 'the frame' with the following true short short short story.

“My uncle Jack drove a herd of cattle up from the United States and ended the cattle drive by herding them down Jasper Avenue.”

I was drawing a parallel between written story and visual image and the relationship with the frame. There is a topic or theme here, there are some selected details, and I have framed these details in a factual sort of way: who, what, where, but left out the why. I left it for the reader to supply an answer based on their own knowledge and imagination. Where is Jasper Avenue and when could this story have happened, who was Jack, what was his life like.....?

We the readers ( or in a photo, the viewers) are invited to participate in our personal version of this story.

Extra 3

The two photographers I used to illustrate the Frame were Cartier-Bresson and Arnold Newman. Bresson is to my mind a superb photographer and although he photographs people in their native habitat we must be aware that these beautifully framed images are far, far beyond snapshot street photography. Here is a quote about his work:

Cartier-Bresson would say that if you want a close-up of someone you have to get close to that person to take it. You can't steal the shot with a long lens.

Don't hide behind the technical capability of your camera by zooming in. Create the frame by your proximity to the person – and that will enhance the psychology of the scene.

Digital Film Making. Mike Figgis

Arnold Newman also takes his equipment to the natural setting of his subjects and photographs them there. He has a knack for placing his subjects in photographic equivalents of the painting styles of the many artists he photographs.

Form, feeling...structure and detail....technique and sensibility: they must all come together.

Arnold Newman

 

Extra 4.Symbolist painting.

I used some painted images in my lecture because Szarkowski, in his book, 'The Photographer's Eye' spends some time writing about the confluence that occurred in the early days of photography between painting and photography and the influence that photography had on Painting. Once we get beyond thinking of a photograph as a separate thing, we can profit from the ideas and their visual solutions of artists from hundreds or, in terms of cave paintings, tens of thousands of years ago.

I showed as many images, both painted and photographed as time would permit because we are dealing in visual thinking and the best way to experience this is to see as much as possible.

Modern painting, perhaps because photography was seen as supplanting the traditional role of painting as recording, went towards more and more emphasis on the formal elements ( towards abstraction and a focus on the picture surface and away from a perspective recreation of 'reality'.) Which meant in effect that a lot of painting became a backwater for the avant gard and art criticism in general. My point is that a lot of art through the ages disappeared from view, but for the photographer, concerned still with 'reality' as the camera captures it, this neglected body of work has much to teach us, more perhaps that a strictly formalist approach. At the heart of every photograph is the thing photographed. It can be a poorly composed, badly taken image but we still look, we are captured by the thing photographed. Painters of an older tradition combined an interest in 'the thing' and one's emotional response, with a concern for how, in formal terms, it could be best expressed. Many thought of the images they made as symbolic and Szarkowski points out that photographs work best as symbols and poorly as narrative. Just as we do in art photography ( or in any branch of photography, if it comes to that) today.

I mentioned in my lecture the other day that while growing up I was influenced by 'The Group of Seven' Canadian landscape painters. A leader of the group and its chief theorist was Lauren Harris, who took his art training, not on Paris but in Berlin where the old symbolist tradition of European Painting was still in vogue.

Two directions. An abstract painting and a European symbolist painting pre-Group of Seven. Notice how the lines are similar in both, but in the abstract they are self referential while in the lake scene they function as part of a landscape. Both are legitimate. 

Extra 5

The cardboard frame, Gustav Klimt.

I used several painted images as examples. One I called special attention to was a tree painting by Klimt, an Austrian painter from one hundred years ago. He used a cardboard rectangle with a square composing hole cut through it to wander the landscape and find and frame his subject matter. We are so used to the 35mm format rectangle that has become normal that we forget that there are other options from landscape and portrait mode. Each frame shape, be it rectangle, square, oval, circle or whatever brings with it another frame with its special compositional pluses and minuses. Greg, in his presentation, showed us his portraits done in landscape mode. Original, with a fresh perspective. 

Every frame contains possibilities, each one has something to say.

Try making simple cardboard frames in different shapes and wander around trying out frames. On Saltspring Island one need not be concerned that this might seem weird, we all have our idiosyncrasies and this would be milder that many. :-)

Speaking of weird, there is a Gustav Klimt movie DVD in the library. You will see him with his square framing devise (and so much more).