September:
Time.
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.
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.
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?