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).

June work-shopping session. Working with detail.

Simplicity is not an end in art, but one reaches simplicity in spite of oneself, by approaching the real meaning of things.

                                                 Brancusi

If you recall, the assignment last month was on DETAIL . Specifically to create four photographs that shared a common detail, however you conceived that to be. There was some confusion as to what detail was: was it 'detail' as in all those little bits of stuff in our photograph, or 'Detail' as Szarkowski defines it as the important element among the many that will express what we think or feel, or is it something broader and could be also named as 'theme'?

At the beginning of this session Simon and Greg both had a shot at clearing up the vagueness associated with the concept of the detail. Essentially theme is a broader classification and detail is the tool that we use to express it. For example, I might be thinking about 'flow' as the theme of spring snow melt and runoff, but will use the detail of falling water to express that idea.

I admit that I found some of the submitted sets of imagery confusing in terms of whether detail was the thing in common or a story element or a certain technical approach. Is a set of images that share a common monochrome treatment for example really talking about detail? Perhaps in seeking to broaden the 'detail' idea we have in the process created a certain vagueness.

The nice thing about this seminar series however is that we get to return to all the previous Sazakowskian slices through art photography over and over again even as we advance to new cross sections: the thing itself, the detail and, next month, the frame. Be sure to return regularly to previous month's postings to review and re-establish a sense of continuity.

During the process of performing a formal analysis on the sets of four images we noticed that the photographer's ideas about what detail formed a common bond was not necessarily obvious to others. A nice set of images of violinists busily sawing away suggested 'music' to the viewers, while it was the detail of eyes that had placed these together in the photographer's mind. Turns out that visual communication is difficult. While photographs can inform and move us 'in the blink of an eye', there is no accurate way of controlling how that will work for each viewer. We bring ourselves to each thing we see.

So, what we can communicate depends on our own personal development, what we are capable of understanding and transmitting, and upon the capacity of the viewer to go to that place also. It is the struggle to bring all the disparate strands together, the sheer difficulty and possible variety that make the whole process challenging and rewarding for all concerned.

The frame. A quick forward glance to next month.

Here are some examples of framing ( Ansel Adams) to get you thinking about this powerful design tool. You have a month, why not experiment with detail and frame?

We will have noticed that it is difficult to discuss detail within a photograph without wandering into the framing of that detail. In photography, unlike in the gradual development of a painting, every consideration about subject matter, selection of the relevant detail, how it will be framed, depth of field, shutter speed, and so on, must come together at the moment of capture. A broad collection of design and technical camera issues come together at the crunch moment of 'click'!

We capture our detail, what our image will contain, and at the same time are framing it, deciding what will be within the walls of the frame and how those details will be arranged. Much of what we end up discussing in the formal analysis work-shopping sessions has to do with concerns around framing.

Here is an example I took recently based upon a Chuck Close self portrait, painted square by square. With a Lucite cover of a lighting fixture and a mini camera held at arm's length I had the means to experiment with his original idea. That was my capture of the detail, but of course I needed to decide what was in or out of the eventual frame, so I cropped to a tall narrow frame and I decided that the hand was important in my version, but the background was not. ( As Greg would point out, the hand of the artist is visible. :)

Chuck Close

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.
.....................................................................

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.

April workshop on 'the thing itself'.

Homework. There is none as such, but please continue to work with 'the thing' with any new understanding that you received during the course of the workshop session. You may wish to re-read Szarkowski and look ahead into his discussion of 'detail'.

The workshop went well from the teacher's perspective. We received some nicely representative images for workshopping that allowed us to discuss the many ways of thinking about 'the thing itself'. One aspect that came up often was that the 'thing' was often not simply the subject matter - the leg hold trap could be about pain, and the two sheep might be about the golden light of evening. We worked through the formal analysis and as a group critiqued very well. Our aim was to encourage student participation and to develop skills of analysis. We all found how individual our views about a photograph can be and yet we all could open our eyes a little wider when we finished. Baudelaire wrote about the role of art criticism as a “widening of the horizon” and that is what we experienced today.

Here is a little piece about detail which will be the topic for May: I thought it was nicely shocking to compare Art photography with something so commercial as advertising. Ansel Adams though, might have seen my point.

The Detail, Advertising and Communication

Szarkowski when he writes about Detail emphasizes how important selection of the appropriate detail is when planning a photograph: we “isolate the fragment, document it and and ....claim for it some special significance, a meaning which [goes] beyond simple description”. The image can be read as a symbol, as “filled with undiscovered meaning”.

I listened to a radio program about advertising this morning, and was struck by the parallel with selecting the detail when making/taking a photograph. The subject being discussed was the 'elevator pitch'; that one sentence, succinct, clear enunciation of an idea within the time it takes an elevator to pass from one floor to another. The main example was when Steve Jobs was trying to lure a Pepsi executive to come and work for Apple. All efforts failed, even an enormous offer of money did not sway Mr. Scully, but what finally moved him was this: “ Do you want to sell sugar water all your life or change the world?”

My point is that choosing the detail that your image will present to the world is very important. One powerful image, clearly expressed is worth more than many another rambling and unfocussed one. It will catch the viewers attention, just as a strong graphic or slogan does in advertising, and without that we cannot communicate at all, but then, with the viewer's attention held for a few seconds, if our image actually stands for something worthwhile we can bridge the communication gap between maker and viewer.

The radio program asks what business we are in and gives the example of Nike shoes: 'Shoes' is the product but what is the company's core purpose: 'Shoes' or 'Just do it!'? It is selling life style, the shoes are secondary. This also can relate to photography and selection of the appropriate subject matter or detail. If a photograph's main function is not to 'make the story clear' but to 'make it real' as Szarkowski writes, then we need to 'tap a universal desire or symbol' just as good advertising does, and that requires some pre-thought or at least a recognition of a great detail when we see it.

Good advertising and good photography have this in common, both are in the business of communication, so clarity and succinctness and the right image for the right purpose is important. Choose your detail with care.

Extra 1

Progress in photography?

A topic that surfaced during the discussion last Sunday was that of 'progress' through time. The idea that recent photography is superior, is more evolved than older styles. This idea is common enough in all areas of thought and seems self evident: are we not smarter and more advanced than our parents, is not Western civilization the pinnacle of human development? You can see that I am being provocative here; few of us today, on the brink of war or of dramatic climate change, would think so anymore, and the older we get the smarter our parents seem in retrospect.

One of the tenents of art criticism is that we cannot, or should not, class works of art by the old Victorian standards of 'progress' and that a work of art, whether it be a superb photograph from the last century, or a painting from several centuries ago or a sculpture from many thousands of years ago, be it the Greek Venus de Milo or that little earth goddess, the Venus of Willendorf, has its own special beauty that exists separately from time, is eternal. It is our job to dig a little deeper until we begin to grasp what is being presented to us. We do not judge or classify, but seek to understand, a much more humble and productive place to be.

So modernism as promoted by Szarkowski preceded post-modernism, but that is all that can be said. In fact many photographers may slide all over the map and not feel that the latest Art photography ideas are the only way to express themselves. There is a long history of art from the distant past to the near present and like the authors who line the shelves of a library, they all have something to communicate to us that pushes aside time and can be relevant to our present concerns.