thrashing about

luis_g · May 4, 2011

Somehow I managed to not open the RF Raven pictures, sorry.

JH - "Phylo said: "How about Black White and Things for a change." How about it, Phylo? What do you think of the stupid book title, and the stupider Frank epigram at the beginning of the book?"

Julie, why don't you tell us how you really feel? . I'm with Phylo on this one.

We do not arrive tabula rasa to our feelings. We've felt before. We may not have 'pre-knowledge', but we have the usual singed nerve endings, history and memory. Does anyone really think Fukase was a stranger to loss when his wife left him? We're not entirely unprepared for what we feel, at least not by the time we're past the teen years, unless one's lived in a pickle jar their entire lives.

I disagree with the bomb-sniffing analogy in a universal sense, and the supposed stasis of the photographer. A friend of mine (not Julie) works by compositing multiple digital images, and she can and does walk around with it, rearranging, shifting elements, form, color, symbols etc moving around. I also think photographers can 'sniff' out images that link with their emotions in an interactive manner.

I believe Julie is coming up against the differences between words and pictures. Have you read Vilem Flusser's excellent little philosophy book on photography?

I see a repeating theme here in trying to formulate absolutisms, rationalizations, formulae and requirements. I'll let you in on a little secret. The first time I went into a wintry landscape, all I had known to that day were tropical landscapes. I had no "Mind of Winter", no idea what that could possibly mean, and the weird thing is that I instantly felt at home with it and in love with the cold, snow and ice. Maybe this isn't entirely rational and varies widely among different people.

Norma Desmond · May 4, 2011

Julie, what I said can apply to photographers in the sense of this thread as well. Notice that Luis and I are emphasizing the active role a photographer may take. Photographers may be more static, passive, as you describe, but there are alternatives to that, even and perhaps especially in the kind of photography being discussed in this thread. What I said in my last two posts might apply especially in the case of the kind of photographer we're talking about in this thread, though as Luis says, this is not absolute or a requirement. Photographers may arrive at similar places differently, different places similarly, and everything in between. Those who get there may be precisely those who don't search for a formula, though even that can be turned on its end by someone who is so in touch with "formulation" that he can't help but shoot a certain way. That kind of obsessiveness may be, in some hands, just what this thread is about.

I keep getting this image of your describing the photographer as a sleuth, waiting . . . waiting. The kind of photographer we're talking about in this thread can also be the mad scientist, throwing ingredients into a test tube, boiling, smoking, and exploding creations . . . a Dr. Frankenstein if you will. This kind of photographer might even dive into the test tube himself.

Something Luis observed is important . . . repetition. We've been many emotional places before. Experience is a building. It can have a rhythm not unlike a fugue.

From Plato's Meno:

MENON: Yes, Socrates. But what do you mean by saying that we do not learn, but what we call learning is remembering? Can you teach me how this is?

SOCRATES: You are a young rogue, as I said a moment ago, Menon, and now you ask me if I can teach you, when I tell you there is no such thing as teaching, only remembering. I see you want to show me up at once as contradicting myself.

MENON: I swear that isn't true, my dear Socrates; I never thought of that, it was just habit. But if you know any way to show me how this can be as you say, show away!

SOCRATES: That is not easy . . .

</blockquote>

Contradiction: learning/remembering. Habit: I never thought of that.

fate_faith_change_chains · May 4, 2011

I also think photographers can 'sniff' out images that link with their emotions in an interactive manner. -Luis

This kind of photographer might even dive into the test tube himself. - Fred

</blockquote>

Just found <a href="http://www.viceland.com/int/v17n11/htdocs/fear-desire-drugs-fucking-608.php?page=1">this</a> through ASX, interesting interview. Photography and the camera as an alibi, sort of.

Norma Desmond · May 4, 2011

Phylo, one of the early answers in the interview provides a lot of food for thought:

The only type of connection I have to the tradition of reportage is coming up with the most efficient ways to deny, denounce or destroy its prejudice. . . . And one has to remember that no photography can pretend to show the truth. A picture only shows a given situation under a very specific perspective, consciously or not, openly or not, relevantly or not. Photographers have to accept they can just convey fragments of illusory realities and relate their own intimate experience of the world. In this process of fictionalising an unreachable truth, it’s up to them to impose their doubts about any photographic truth, or accept being impotent pawns in the mediatic game.

</blockquote>

There are suggestions of layering and echoing in this statement, which I would emphasize. It's important that the prejudice (more benignly, the perspective) of the photographer and the photograph and also the fragments (I like to call them "glimpses" because it's visual) that the photographer and photograph can convey are not seen as against a fixed truth or reality of the non-photographic world. For the non-photographic world is also a matter of prejudice, perspective, and fragmentation. Even the concept of "unreachable truth" is a hard one to articulate because it suggests that there is a truth that is unreachable. And there likely is not such a truth. So there's really nothing that is unreachable.

This helps me further elucidate what I meant by diving into the test tube. THANKS! We can never take that final objective step backward, never really escape from Plato's cave and we may have to stop believing there's something Ideal existing beyond our caves. Our caves may be the so-called truth . . . not something else. It may go a step too far to say that life is a photograph. But life may be very much like one. It may be painting, which seems, at least to some, more liberated from the constraints of finiteness and the "real world," that is in actuality fooling us into thinking there's a way out of the cave. It may just seem so.

fate_faith_change_chains · May 4, 2011

Even the concept of "unreachable truth" is a hard one to articulate because it suggests that there is a truth that is unreachable. And there likely is not such a truth. So there's really nothing that is unreachable. It may be painting, which seems, at least to some, more liberated from the constraints of finiteness and the "real world," that is in actuality fooling us into thinking there's a way out of the cave. It may just seem so.

</blockquote>

<a name="pagebottom"></a> Yes, like Schopenhauer said, "every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world".The unreachable truth might be simply that what lies beyond the scope of ones own field of vision.But it's like never being able to arrive at or beyond the horizon. I don't think that there's really nothing ( of truth ) that's unreachable, because there's not such a truth to reach like you say, but rather that there is a truth but that is constanly moving forward too, as soon as we get closer to it. But there's not a truth to have or possess. ( besides that which is true, : / )

Truth always seems to need something else, besides itself, to be recognised as truth. Maybe that's the stepping backward.

I've been watching <a href="http://www.ustream.tv/decoraheagles">these guys</a> lately. Can't get enough of 'em. There's so much truth there. There's no theatre, no play or stage, like in so much of the "outside world". Not that there can be no truth in theatre but it's like *our world*, their outside world, is the cave when watching them. Yes, I need that "outside world", to recognize the world of the birds as being an added truth, more truth...limitless somehow.

Either way, I think photographic truth is internal truth.

fate_faith_change_chains · May 4, 2011

Photography is frustrating sometimes. You have to pick up your camera. Then you have to go somewhere to take some pictures of something, or call someone to get their picture taken. Then you have to process the film or load the files into the computer. Then you have to view them and select stuff and make them right, better, best. Then you have a picture you can look at and for others to look at. Then you start again looking for that next picture. Pictures of stuff, stuffed pictures, does it ever end ? And what was it again that made you pick up that camera. Some semi-truth.

Norma Desmond · May 4, 2011

"And what was it again that made you pick up that camera."

</blockquote>

The artificial.

luis_g · May 5, 2011

"every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world"

While most do, I do not think everyone does.Specially those who were raised religious. They believe there is another world, an invisible one, beyond the field of vision.

________________________________________________

Things that caught my eye out of that interview with D'Agata...

"The world is not made out of what we see but from what we do. Photographers who ignore this state of things—and today, as in the past, most of them do—reduce photography to its capacity for recording reality."

"My books are careless and full of flaws, my images are messy and my writing is awkward. But all these are just tools, not quite assimilated yet, in an absolutely determined search, that allows no concession or compromise."

"I’ll use whatever I can put my hand on—alcohol, drugs, rage, sex or fear—to push my own limits and make sure the final image is not an illustration or a statement. This doesn’t mean I won’t be a maniac when it comes to building the coherence of the work later."

"I said drugs allow me not to think too much"

"Solidarity has to go through the flesh. Words and thoughts are not worth much. They just help to identify the nature of the gap between the other and myself"

What a kamikaze this guy is...some insightful things there.

_________________________________________________________

Julie H · May 5, 2011

*sigh*

That's an interesting interview, Phylo. D'Agata reminds me a little bit of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Rouch">Jean Rouch</a>. You're getting the "thrashing" part of my post but not my main intent.

One last time, I'm interested in cases where one is unexpectedly overwhelmed by something that is off-message, off-narrative, off-theme, off-expectation, off-road, off the menu, off the chart, outside the box, your WTF moments. D'Agata (and Rouch) and Nan Goldin and so on and so forth are thrashing about but ON a theme. Enclosed. Directed. They may be pelting their target with cluster-bombs, but they most definitely have a target.

fate_faith_change_chains · May 5, 2011

That's what I feel - know - when I look at those eagles from my link of the Decorah eagles nest. Overwhelmed by seeing through them without the cataract of the mind, my mind.

I see them being neither off-message nor message, neither off-narrative nor narrative, neither off-theme nor theme, neither off-expectation nor expectation,...they just are.(*)

But you cannot really photograph that ( or anything else that strikes you that way ) or write a poem about it...to do that is to conceptualize it and create a reason for it as the reason to create.

* ok, the 3 little ones have a theme, and it's mostly *fluffy*, but as they grow they're getting more off-fluffy by the day.

luis_g · May 5, 2011

JH - "...off-message, off-narrative, off-theme, off-expectation, off-road, off the menu, off the chart, outside the box, your WTF moments."

That's a lot of "offs".Almost off-putting.

_____________________________________________

JH - "D'Agata (and Rouch) and Nan Goldin and so on and so forth are thrashing about but ON a theme. Enclosed. Directed. They may be pelting their target with cluster-bombs, but they most definitely have a target."

Target? Bombs? What? Who says the language of War does not filter into public consciousness? What a way to look at this!

No, these people are integrated, inextricably intertwined with their work. Almost all of their experiences are going to fall within the scope of their lives, therefore, their work. The entire point is that they are not distanced, but immersed in what they do. Not like most people, at a safe distance, emotionally, physically, intellectually, etc from the work. Their consuming devotion to the work is difficult to understand for those that are dis-integrated from theirs.

________________________________________________

As far as things so "off-off-off" that they have no referent, I mean none, the last thing I remember that happened to me in that category was the time I saw a UFO, and it was relatively close for its large size. No, there was no intoxication, swamp gas, Venus, a silent helicopter etc., and since I do have referents for people here who weren't there to come out and deny and ridicule my experience -- it is Photo Net, after all -- I will not tell it here. It would have been an infinitely better and kinder experience had it been Jesus on a flaming cloud with a coterie of angels announcing the end of the World.

_______________________________________________

Norma Desmond · May 5, 2011

An approach or way of writing poetry or photographing (such as Williams is talking about) does not have to and probably can't exist in isolation. It will overlap with other qualities and experiences. What Williams is describing, as Phylo alludes to, requires at least a pen and a camera. So it is already bound and not as free as Julie would like. Experience is a web, not a bunch of unrelated strands.

A theme (repetition again) does not thwart Williams's kind of project. Just like a human being doesn't thwart it. Sure, we could hang a camera on a string in the middle of a wind storm and let it truly thrash about (though it would be bound by the limits of the length of the string), undirected. That degree of purity (and it's not, of course, pure) approaches the kind of randomness and detachment Julie may be looking for. But in order for a human to be off-message, off-narrative, off-theme, and off-expectation, and in order for a viewer to recognize this, there is implied (at least for me) some sense of being on-message, on-narrative, on-theme, and on-expectation. The only truly nihilistic photographic act would be not taking a photograph. The minute you take the photograph you have undermined this so-called project. But I don't think you have to see it or experience it as an undermining, unless you are a purist, which itself could bind you in so many ways. A theme could be just the obsession that will get you to this place Williams describes.

What you may see (and I'm sure others do) as Nan Goldin's "theme" may just be your own organizational skills at work. For Nan Goldin, it may be that her WTF moments are breaths that are off the charts. She may be very naturally-inclined, spontaneously moved by, least understanding of, moments that to you look like they cohere. Yet they may be the most incoherent of experiences from her standpoint. The repetition shouldn't be considered a flaw in the project of lack of understanding. Rote can defy understanding profoundly.

I would suggest that you are viewing many of these works from a perspective that you are trying to rid yourself of in photographing (or at least establish that others are doing it photographically). Let me also suggest that for you to recognize that another is doing it, you would have already lost the battle because that very re-cognition would already betray the purity of lack of expectation you're claiming could be achieved.

fate_faith_change_chains · May 5, 2011

The closest thing I can think of to Julie's off-'ness in context to photography, which means the visual world, is photography done as if one is blind, like photography done by blind people. But then, once there's the photograph and a viewer in front of it, this visual "off-ness" is no more. http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/international/2008/09/03/ime.58.bk.a.cnn?iref=videosearch

Julie H · May 6, 2011

One's own body deals with WTF moments all day long. It's called the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigen_presentation">immune system</a>. Invert that system's response to acceptance instead of search and destroy and you may find what I'm after.

fate_faith_change_chains · May 6, 2011

Here is a quote :

As imagination gives vitality to form, form keeps imagination from driving us into psychosis. This is the ultimate necessity of limits. There is a curiously sharp sense of joy or mild ecstasy that comes when you find the particular form required for your creation: … the experience of "This is the way things are meant to be." We participate for a moment in the myth of creation, and at the same time know more vividly our own limitations. What if imagination and art are the fountainhead of human experience? Imagination – seems to be a principle in human life underlying even reason, for the rational functions, according to our definitions, can lead to understanding, can participate in the constituting of reality only as they are creative.

-Rollo May, The Courage to Create

</blockquote>

Is what you're after some kind of psychosis, but one with the form, or are you looking for the form of the psychosis itself ?

luis_g · May 6, 2011

The immune system has a clear ontology and is in fact, prepared for particular assaults. It, too, does not exist in isolation. However...genetics is routinely spitting out mutations, and some of these in unexpected attacks from new pathogens save the day. A lot of the time, they weaken and or kill the vessel, too.

Which leads me into Phylo/Rollo May and back to Juan Carlos Williams. I think it was Doczi who said "Without form there are no limits". It's commutative, as May's quote points out. It is also true and we've all read similar things across time...like the sleep of reason, or those about what lies beyond the horizon. A very few artists do play and ply that edge, not looking for psychosis (!), but to expand/break out of the limits. Overdo it, and one's energies are likely to dissipate, get out-of-control blurry, or become caricatures of themselves.

As far as the psychosis thing goes, there's a quote from Jung to James Joyce (I think) regarding the latter's daughter. Joyce asks how come he can go into his subconscious and return without ill-effect, but his daughter could not. The reply was something like: "You jump in, she falls in". Jump.

jtk · May 7, 2011

Phylo, I happened to be doing sensory deprivation research in graduate school when Rollo May visited. I'd enjoyed his easily-read ideas as a freshman, but had by graduate school relegated him to "pop psychologist."

Sure enough, he gave his big speech at my school while I was in the middle of research: he talked about the "psychosis" he claimed people experienced in sensory deprivation chambers...like the one I was operating at the time (steel room floating on springs in the middle of another steel room, double meat-locker doors etc). May had no basis for his claim, could cite no research. It seemed clear that he didn't even know what "psychosis" meant (Luis hints at it's nature in his reference to Joyce's daughter). Immersed in the body of sensory deprivation scientific lliterature, I realized May wasn't even honest.

jtk · May 7, 2011

People have always done "art" in all sorts of states. Alcoholic stupors, religious ecstacies, physical agonies, cold deliberation, zen-like neutrality, cynical pandering... Those aren't "psychotic" states. Psychotic people do of course do "art," but the wildest stuff often gets done by remarkably sane people in their happiest, least-freaked-out states.

I have the impression that photographers are typically very distant from painters (for example) and imagine that "crazy" painting says something about the state of mind of the painters themselves.

My own experience with painters is that they are typically very thoughtful about their work, fully aware of what they're doing and, more often than not, they work from theories and explore personal frames of reference. In other words, they're not as nuts as people who work in cubicles, dulling their senses at the end of the day.

fate_faith_change_chains · May 7, 2011

Sensory deprivation must be somewhere of the opposite of what ( I think ) Julie was thinking about with her WTF moment of acceptance and letting things in, rather than keeping things out. But all deeper truths deal in seeming paradoxes and such a sensory deprived chamber of "nothingness" without a beginning and an end might be exactly the place to ignite the ah ( alpha ) and the oh ( omega ) of a WTF moment.

jtk · May 7, 2011

Phylo, sensory deprivation research at the time demonstrated that we filled our vision with grey and speckles (phosphenes) when deprived of all light for a long time. We create that. There was of course a German word for it: "ganzfeld"

I was aware of three likely explanations: 1) it's noise in a system, the inevitable, if ever so slight background inherent in audio recording and in film (like film fog...there was no digital). 2) we create that noise when there's no external perception in order to keep our systems in balance. 3) we create "veil of maya" to fabricate a sense of normalcy..it's more comfortable than a void.

Julie's wtf moment could occur with stimulation or with deprivation, but my sense is that if we bombard our systems with information (boom box, Bach, flashing lights, physical exertion etc) it may be harder to "let things in" (to let discrete, idenfiable things in) than when we're in a more quiet state, eg sitting zazen or playing with our images. I doubt raves are any less likely to lead to revelations than Bach: I suspect wtf comes in when we're a) quiet b) ready for it ("seek ye the lord when he is near" and "consciousness favors the prepared mind") and c) when we're not expecting it. "When we're not expecting it" relates both to Buddhist non-striving and to the Christian image of the decending dove that represents the Spirit, the Holy Ghost (ie from outside ourselves).

I think "wtf" hints a Julie's concept, but not as well as her photos. The rest seems to me to be smoke screen, veil of maya, intentional deception, amplified noise. Her photos make her point. She's a photographer who is trying to make a photographic point in words. Nevah hoppen.

fate_faith_change_chains · May 8, 2011

Interview with sculptor Antony Gormley ( <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Antony_Gormley_Quantum_Cloud_2000.jpg">Quantum Cloud</a>, <a href="http://public-art.shu.ac.uk/images/98~3199.jpg">Angel of the North</a> )

There are two theories about space - Newtonian absolute and independent. Then Leibnitz who said it is relationship. Kant said both may be true but its only experienced subjectively and our whole way of thinking about left right, front etc is in relation to our bodies and we project that onto space. I started thinking that all of that can be inverted. Our bodies are created by the potential of three dimensions. We become registers of an idea about space that is only experienced by the body. The space I'm interested in, and try to enter, is adimensional. It doesn't have this quality of dimension and it makes no sense to say "in front, behind, left, right" You loose all sense of those kinds of coordinates. That enlightenment idea of understanding the principles by which life is sustained has little to do with the space I'm interested in. Its a kind of ...a darkness without fear. It may contain the possibility of evil but in some curious way, because you have entered voluntarily, the experience of it is about potential and power. Just as the spatial coordinates we use to make sense of the outside have to be left behind so too do moral coordinates. I was once talking about the darkness of the body and someone said, "oh, you mean evil." But no, I mean that darkness we carry with us always that is neither evil or good but is the space of consciousness within the body. http://www.fdavidpeat.com/interviews/gormley.htm

</blockquote>

The bold also expresses Luis' Jung quote of jumping in, not falling in.

a photographer who is trying to make a photographic point in words

</blockquote>

Yes, that's what we're all doing here, communicating with words. But there's no "photographic point", but a point that may or may not be possible to be made or seen in photographs.

jtk · May 8, 2011

Phylo, words man relatively little when they're used in quirky, individualistic ways. Their value is in word assemblies. When the assembled words are too inventively used they may be amusing to some, but they lose power for most.

Poetry, for example, isn't inherently communicative...in fact, much of the reason it's loved involves the thin ice upon which is skates when it uses words coherently, and the reason it's unloved is the collapse of that ice that occurs when the alleged poet uses words falsely.

Happily this is a photo forum. Here, we know substitution of words for images is inherently inadequate. Similarly, we see many examples of writing better than associated photos, and photos more substantial than associated writing (in which poetry is sometimes alleged).

fate_faith_change_chains · May 8, 2011

Poetry, for example, isn't inherently communicative...in fact, much of the reason it's loved involves the thin ice upon which is skates when it uses words coherently, and the reason it's unloved is the collapse of that ice that occurs when the alleged poet uses words falsely.

</blockquote>

Sure it is, but the communicative isn't inherently significant, nor does poetry have to be of any significance other than what it does or doesn't communicates.

words mean relatively little when they're used in quirky, individualistic ways. Their value is in word assemblies. When the assembled words are too inventively used they may be amusing to some, but they lose power for most.

</blockquote>

You mean, like, "poetry skating on thin ice" ?

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