What is it?

<p>Julie - "It is about the fascinating interweavings via posture, eyes, clothing, tones, of the group in the same way as the same kind of interweavings as are found in Steve's picture."</p>

<p>Why not just argue that you see the Shanghai merchant photo as a fascinating interweaving like you saw the famous girls as a fascinating interweaving and leave it at that? We all saw something else, not because we didn't look, not because we don't know what a photo is. Why not just talk about the picture as opposed to abstracting some concept or analogy as an exercise in, what, how to look at art; or how to not look at art except as a stimulus to word play that has little to do with important feminist content in the 4 teenage girl photo, for example. The thing is, you saw it your way and I appreciate how you saw it, others saw it a different way and were told they just didn't look.</p>

<p><strong>Charles:</strong> <em>"how to not look at art except as a stimulus to word play"</em></p>

<p>A very good point, Charles. One that often comes to mind.</p>

<p><strong>Charles:</strong> <em>"The thing is, you saw it your way and I appreciate how you saw it, others saw it a different way and were told they just didn't look."</em></p>

<p>This is tricky, IMO. I think there's an art to viewing photos.</p>

<p>I didn't see what you saw, but found it interesting to hear what you saw. I've heard you talk about photos enough to know you look . . . and see well.</p>

<p>But in reading through that thread, I did get the feeling that a lot of people were, of course, looking, but I'd question the photographic depth some were viewing with. And I know this sounds a little elitist (though to me it's just being realistic), and I can live with that. Viewing can occur at a variety of different levels, just as photography can. I think there are more experienced and more expressive and more nuanced and more expert photographers than others. And I'd have to say the same about viewers.</p>

<p>For me, this still means that anyone is entitled to photograph and their photographs can be appreciated for what they are and can give them great fulfillment. And anyone is entitled to view a photo any way they want. But there are some photos that are going to mean more to me than others. And there are some readings of photos that are going to mean more to me than others. I will be happy for the viewer that is enriched by his or her viewing of a photo. But I know, over the years, I have developed my viewing skills to where I get more out of photos in general than I used to. I think it is, in part, a learned skill, or a practiced one, or at least one that often matures with experience. And I think it's not unfair to question how we look and what we see. Though, as I said, it's very tricky stuff and we risk stepping on toes when we do so.</p>

<p>Don't mean to sound too frustrated. I think too it's partly a case of relative importance. Someone may get a degree in photography to learn a lot about how to create an effect and it may not be that important to the viewer the ins and outs of why a photograph works for them. With those 4 girls, shown in a photo-journal on social issues, not a coffee table book of works hanging in a museum: well you know, I take the point that it takes study to look, and even extended that point to say that we don't look, hardly look at anything let alone a photograph. But those 4 girls are in the equivalent of the Life Styles section of the Sunday paper with the photographs an accompaniment to the author's words, not art per se. </p>

<p>While I am attempting to make sense of the various tributaries that have branched off the main thread (comment on all? comment on any?)...I find myself laughing at the references to "Steve's photo". It is Lauren Greenfield's photo. I know we all know this, yet I wonder why I am saddled with the burden of ownership? ;-)</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Steve, I'm one of the culprits. After I posted, I realized I should have said the photo that Steve linked to. </p>

<p>Why are you saddled with ownership? A couple of thoughts. 1) We know you and don't know Greenfield. 2) You put it on the Internet . . . you own it. Just being facetious of course, with the latter. Mostly, it's quickspeak and a little laziness on my part.</p>

<p>Fred -- I'm just joking around (which you know). I have some volunteer work I have to run off to in a minute, but reading the last few pages I have been struck by so many different thoughts (sparked by some of your comments, and some of other posters) that I want to just sit here and consider them all. I hope I don't forget by the time I can get back to this thread.</p>

<p>The entirety of its ingrediants comprise a 'dish' of something, say a dish of ice cream. The term dish refers in that usage to portion size. A dish of ice cream can have too much ice cream or can have ice cream with too much salt in it as an ingrediant: either way a dish of ice cream is a portion of ice cream regardless if the contents are any good.</p>

<p>A dish can even have nothing on it, or can have anything on it, within it. One dish is distinguised from another only by what the dish contains, a measure of a food. Similar ingredients form a stew, other ingredients form a cassorole, etc. Stew is distinguished from cassorole, but at the point of comparison of stew and cassorole, we aren't talking about a dish any longer. We're talking about food. In photography then, we might say, "Oh, bring me a frame (dish) of something, a wooden frame (dish) with matting, holding something suitable for a living room." Genre compares to a particular food, but I don't think anything is gained by substituting the word 'dish' for the word 'food', the word dish only allowing a discussion of our experience of no particular thing, the frame emptied by our consumption of its photographic content, and our take away reduced to just our experience of the energy of a photo, energy as a separate thing, a thing in itself, energy stripped of content. Energy that is a feeling, intense, indifferent, sublime: the only thing unique about a feeling is the uniqueness of the person experiencing it, but it isn't feeling devoid of the content that evoked it, the feeling itself without content is no special thing to be extracted. The only thing special is the person who felt it.</p>

<blockquote> "<em>letting <strong>the picture</strong> be what it is</em>" - Julie H</blockquote>

<blockquote> </blockquote>

<blockquote>"As he struggled to come to terms with Winogrand's late works [which he thought was weak as compared to his early stuff], Szarkowski wrote that Winogrand "constructed clever evasions to distance himself from the moral implications that others might see in the world of his pictures." ... Szarskowski stated that "if he had with words plumbed too deeply the meaning of his pictures -- had allowed analytic intelligence to look too insistently over the shoulder of intuition -- intuition might have been cowed."</blockquote>

<blockquote> </blockquote>

<p>In my world -- the only one that I can plumb with any reasonable expectation of comprehension -- the most significant photographs (by others) frequently reek of, and burst at the seams with, intuition. Szarkowski does not state it this strongly, but analytic intelligence is the enemy of intuition. Analysis is best applied to the photographs of others, and kept securely locked in a lead-lined box when creating one's own photographs. Although it can be (and should be) brought out again, after a period of time, and applied to one's own photographs. "What is it?" It is what is there. It is the four girls in Greenfield's photograph, just as Julie described them: </p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>there is drama in the left to right undulation through the hair; left to right from eye to eye to eye; from left to right in the increasing back and forth torso-twistings; from left to right the rising degree of vamp from the first (motherly, with bra) to the crescendo with the hair, face, and twist of the third girl (braless), to the slowing/concluding cadence of the last girl (chest fully covered); that I enjoy all the shades of blue/lavender etc. etc. — are you bored stiff? Or does everybody else also see this but feel that it's personal/private or somehow unimportant or to "arty" to confess in a public forum?</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Too arty? Too personal or private? No, not at all. Certainly not in this particular forum. Yet that photograph is also what viewers may make of it. There is a disappointing trend of condescension toward the notion that personal experience is a valid method of comprehending and discussing a photograph. A beginning point only, yes. The "thereness", the "itness", of the image must also be considered, along with the how and the why. But to disparage what a viewer brings to a photo seems...foolish and illogical. The experience is the flesh on the bones of the photograph. Without it there is only color, tone, shape, and arrangement of object(s), the point of view, bla bla bla. The more experience (both in life and in viewing and paying attention to photographs) the more solid the flesh that can be placed on the bones. Can the "wrong" flesh be placed on the bones? Perhaps. A viewer looking at this <a href="http://c300221.r21.cf1.rackcdn.com/laughing-woman-with-ice-cream-cone-by-garry-winogrand-1968-1344433657_org.jpg">woman with an ice cream cone</a> may come to vastly different conclusion as to its meaning or significance (or utter lack thereof) than Floyd, or Julie, or me. What is it? A woman with an ice cream cone, seemingly amused, standing on a street in front of a men's clothing store. A banal and pointless moment? Or?</p>

<p>Words. A "Tunisian date" can mean a food or it can mean a dinner companion from a particular country. Words can be used to cleverly, or not so cleverly, describe a photograph. But the true grasp of a photograph can often only be had by going to the place that exists between the words used to describe it. What is it? </p>

<p> </p>

<p><strong>Steve:</strong> <em>"but analytic intelligence is the enemy of intuition"</em></p>

<p>Have to disagree with you here, Steve. They can go hand in hand. One can be analyzing quite intelligently a situation or a potential shot and still use intuition or be intuitive in shooting it. One can analyze intelligently how to post process a shot and still leave room for intuition to come into play when it kicks in. My experience is they can be strange and powerful bedfellows rather than enemies.</p>

<p><strong>Steve:</strong> <em>"Analysis is best applied to the photographs of others, and kept securely locked in a lead-lined box when creating one's own photographs.</em></p>

<p>For some, this is likely true. Sometimes, it is said but also belied by the reality of the working situation. For others, it is just false. Great thing that variety!</p>

<p>For Steve :) :</p>

<p>.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>As the secret blackness of milk, of which Valéry spoke, is accessible only through its whiteness, the idea of light or the musical idea doubles up the lights and sounds found beneath, is their other side or their depth. Their carnal texture presents us what is absent from all flesh; it is a furrow that traces itself out magically under our eyes without a tracer, a certain hollow, a certain interior, a certain absence, a negativity that is not nothing ...</p>

<p>... We do not possess the musical or sensible ideas, precisely because they are negativity or absence circumscribed; they possess us. The performer is no longer producing or reproducing the sonata: he feels himself, and the others feel him to be at the service of the sonata; the sonata sings through him or cries out so suddenly that he must "dash on his bow" to follow it.<br>

— <em>Maurice Merleau-Ponty</em>, The Visible and the Invisible</p>

</blockquote>

<p>.<br>

Most great photograhers expect, hope! -- but don't require -- that we respond to their work in this manner. Eggleston makes it mandatory.</p>

<p>This is what makes their work more than ordinary.</p>

<p>I try to keep in mind the difference between an original stance toward or response to a photo or work of art and a critical discussion of that same work of art. The former might lead to what I think Charles was referring to above, the "play with words" Merleau-Ponty so poetically expresses. The other will be a bit more down to earth and analytical. Doesn't mean either stance or response is the only one an individual can have. It's just how one talks about a work in different contexts. There's no reason one can't go from the experiential to the critical and back again a million times, each adding depth and breadth to the other, often losing sight of which mode one is even in, because they so feed on each other.</p>

<p>I find most clear distinctions of so-called opposites, here made quite "black and white" for us by Ponty, to be false or, at best, misleading. It's ironic coming from a philosopher, Ponty, whose own ideas were, in part, his own carnal texture.</p>

 

<blockquote>

<a href="/photodb/user?user_id=2361079">Fred G.</a> <a href="/member-status-icons"><img title="Subscriber" src="/v3graphics/member-status-icons/sub7.gif" alt="" /><img title="Frequent poster" src="/v3graphics/member-status-icons/3rolls.gif" alt="" /><img title="Current POW Recipient" src="/v3graphics/member-status-icons/trophy.gif" alt="" /></a>, Dec 19, 2013; 02:17 a.m.

</blockquote>

 

 

<blockquote>

<p><strong>Steve:</strong> <em>"but analytic intelligence is the enemy of intuition"</em><br>

Have to disagree with you here, Steve. They can go hand in hand. One can be analyzing quite intelligently a situation or a potential shot and still use intuition or be intuitive in shooting it. One can analyze intelligently how to post process a shot and still leave room for intuition to come into play when it kicks in. My experience is they can be strange and powerful bedfellows rather than enemies.<br>

<strong>Steve:</strong> <em>"Analysis is best applied to the photographs of others, and kept securely locked in a lead-lined box when creating one's own photographs.</em><br>

For some, this is likely true. Sometimes, it is said but also belied by the reality of the working situation. For others, it is just false. Great thing that variety!</p>

</blockquote>

 

 

 

Fred -- Absolutely. And really we are not in disagreement. I prefaced what I wrote with "<em>In my world</em>" for a reason. (For me there is a significant difference between "in my world" and "in my opinion".) What I wrote was more in the context of Julie's quote of Szarkowski. My interpretation of what he meant by analysis is not of the "stand here, frame this, use this lens, exclude that object" variety. I take it to have meant analysis of meaning, symbolism, nuances, cultural signifiers, etc. The editing (selection), post processing and printing is the "analysis" that occurs after the act of taking the photograph and I by no means intended to diminish its importance.

 

 

 

 

 

I am inconsistent and imprecise. Talk to me tomorrow and I may posit something completely different. I do my best. Sometimes precision in understanding requires a seeming imprecision in communication to capture the visceral meaning that sometimes only exists between the words -- the "blackness" of the "whiteness" -- and which words alone, no matter how rigorously defined, can successfully impart.

 

 

 

 

 

Julie -- thanks for that quote, I appreciate it as I think you knew I would.

 

 

<p>As to Mr. Carnal Textures, I suppose it was the case of a smart fellow whose chief purpose wasn't to actually look at what it is and talk about that, but instead whose chief purpose was to distinguish himself and his ideas within academia. The soundness, validity, reliability, comprehensibility of his language wouldn't matter to him all that much in that setting, just how differentiated from other academics his smart wording allowed him to appear. Perhaps that is too cynical of a view of him. On the other hand, the people of France spent a lot of money on Ponty's education and I'm not sure they got much value for that money. Because I see Ponty as deliberately moving his words around like chess pieces, smart and consistent perhaps, but not focused much on whether a chess board is a very good representation of the realities that the game of chess itself analogizes. As someone great once said, words are a map of territory and we should therefore not forget that words are not the territory; where words can take on a life of their own, become quite easily irrelevant to the territory they describe. As much as possible the language we use to convey our commonalities shouldn't be needlessly complex, I say on behalf of the taxpayers of France.</p>

<p><strong>Charles:</strong> <em>"Perhaps that is too cynical of a view of him."</em></p>

<p>I think it is. Though I have my disagreements with Ponty and with the way his quote is being used here, I don't see a reason to question his sincerity toward and appreciation of his subject matter in favor of viewing his motives as simply distinguishing himself among his peers. My relationship to most thinkers of his caliber is that they stand in dialogue with others throughout the ages. He had important things to say and consider, and marks an important place in aesthetic theory even when he wasn't necessarily talking about aesthetics. That he is right or wrong is much less important to me than the breadth of his ideas and that they encompass at least a part of looking, even if it doesn't cover the totality of it. Certainly the idea of a musician being in service of the music or having the music speak or play through the musician is not that foreign, eccentric, or self serving an idea.</p>

<p>I disagree with you about words, by the way. When words are used well, they can both map the territory and become it. A good philosopher, or novelist, or poet, will not only use words to refer to the subject and to describe and explain it. They will make the words act in such a way as to mirror or reflect or shed light on the subject, in their use itself. Philosophy is not only in the ideas presented. So much of it is in the way those ideas are weaved into a whole. I don't read Descartes, Nietzsche, Kant, Ponty only for the ideas themselves. I read them also for the way the ideas are formed and take shape, the process of their taking shape, the internal (and external) dialogue they seem to convey, for the very usage of the words will often reflect on and even help propose the ideas themselves. I see their use of words and logic, sentence structure, premise and conclusion, step-by-step reasoning, use of metaphor and analogy, as I do the musical line of the violin in the orchestra or the lead guitar in a band. It's why Plato wrote dialogues instead of narratives, why Sartre wrote plays in addition to treatises, why Wittgenstein wrote aphorisms instead of metaphysical essays, why Descartes wrote meditatively and skeptically rather than dogmatically. Words, and their use, often cannot be separated from the territory they are mapping.</p>

<p>Fred: "When words are used well, they can both map the territory and become it.. "</p>

<p>That's where my mind turns to Ken Schles' comment about image, where Schles observed that Socrates, who hated imagery, provided us with imagery, metaphor in order to best communicate his philosophical sense of things. And it seems to be Ponty, like everyone I suppose, who would also 'dash on his bow' for the wordless experience of a sonata.</p>

<p>Charles, can you provide a citation for Schles's comments about Socrates and imagery or for Socrates's comments about imagery themselves to which you and Schles refer.</p>

<p>My understanding is that it was representational imagery that Socrates had a problem with, rather than metaphorical imagery or imagery itself, but my memory could certainly be refreshed on that. The allegory of the cave and Socrates's seeing himself as a midwife don't seem inconsistent with any of his views that I've read. Rather, it is paintings of beds, for example, that he sees as more removed from the truth than other beds. Socrates's use of the image of shadows on the wall of a cave isn't being used to represent what actual shadows on the wall of a cave are like, but rather to help us understand what opinion is like compared to knowledge.</p>

<p>From <em>The Republic:</em><br /> "We have here three sorts of bed: one which exists in the nature of things and <br /> which . . . we could only describe as a product of divine workmanship; another <br /> made by the carpenter; and a third by the painter." (326) <br /> <br /> God, he argues, “made only one ideal or essential bed” (326) after which the material beds are <br /> patterned. He is the “author of the true nature of Bed” (327) and all his works constitute the <br /> true nature of things” (327). The carpenter is the “manufacturer of a bed” (327) while the <br /> painter is the artist who “<strong>represents</strong> [my emphasis] the things which the other two make” (327). The “work <br /> of the artist” (327), Socrates concludes, is therefore “at a third remove from the essential <br /> nature of the thing” (327). Because the tragic poet is also an “artist who represents things” <br /> (327), albeit in a form different from the painting, this will also apply to him: “he and all other <br /> artists are, as it were, at a third remove from the throne of truth” (327). To put this another <br /> way, the artist (painter or writer) seeks to “<strong>represent</strong>” (327) not the “reality that exists in the <br /> nature of things” (327) but the “products of the craftsman” (327) and of nature (trees, <br /> mountains, etc.) as these appear to the onlooker.</p>

<p>Mind you, I'm not defending Plato's or Socrates's views of art or, indeed, many of the objectionable ideas put forth in <em>The Republic</em>. But I don't think they are undermined by any so-called inconsistency.</p>

<p>Fred, here's the citation, did Schles get it wrong as to representation as opposed to generally despising images??? Thanks.</p>

<p>http://www.onshadow.com/artists/schles-ken/an-interview/</p>

<blockquote>

<p>This brings me back to<a href="http://kenschles.wordpress.com/2011/07/24/allegory-of-the-cave-the-dialectic-of-the-image-is-thus/"> a discussion in Oculus about Plato’s Republic</a>, and the use of Plato’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave" target="_blank">Allegory of the Cave</a> to describe the meaning behind Plato’s “line of cognition.” To me this argument encapsulates a large part of our discussion here. Plato despised images because they didn’t reflect a “true” reality. He was trying to get towards an objective knowledge of things. I find images interesting, expressly because of the conundrum they present. They project things they are not; they allow us to see, through metaphor. I’ve become extraordinarily fascinated by Plato, because what is perhaps his greatest discussion is embodied in the allegory of the cave, which is itself an image, a metaphor. Here’s a guy who hates images, and yet he is compelled to create an image to convey meaning and to project significance.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Charles, I'm by no means an expert on Plato, but until I put in a little more research, I do think Schles may be getting it wrong, or at least approaching it eccentrically, at least as far as this particular quote of his takes us.</p>

 

<p>Plato, I think, recognizes perception's limits but also recognizes its necessity as a starting-point of knowledge. Images, as being a rung on the ladder lower than perception, are too often deceptive, as can be perception itself, especially when we mistake them for what they are standing in for. </p>

 

<p>Socrates was nothing if not an ironist. It would stand to reason that he, himself, would use imagery even while being so skeptical of it. Socrates is the man who professed his own ignorance, usually lauding the intellectual capacities of his interlocutors, while always maintaining the intellectual upper hand in the very same dialogues and arguments with them. He would not be beyond using imagery in an attempt to show the follies of relying on it. For he weaves the images in the Allegory of the Cave with higher-minded Ideas and Ideals. He uses the image as a stepping-stone to knowledge, not as representation but as metaphor, not content to rest with thinking the image itself is the truth or even shows it, but rather as a pathway toward it. He would claim that most art of his time does not do that. He would say that representational art is a bit like idolatry, substituting the mere appearance for the reality.</p>

 

<p>In any case, it may be insufficient, but it's the best I can do for now.</p>

<p><strong>Charles:</strong> <em>"And it seems to be Ponty, like everyone I suppose, who would also 'dash on his bow' for the wordless experience of a sonata."</em></p>

<p>Getting back to Ponty, words, and photos. I've heard it a lot and, to be honest, it's one of the reasons I got frustrated enough with Philosophy and was moved to try my hand at playing the piano for quite a few years and then moving into photography. Words to explain and describe art always seemed to fail where art was much better at doing it itself. But I try not to be unfair or unkind to philosophers, whose job it is to describe what is often the indescribable. So philosophers have to talk about love and about truth and about art. And, for me, it's just too easy a mark to fault them for talking about the unspeakable . . .</p>

<p><strong>Charles:</strong> <em>"like everyone I suppose"</em></p>

<p>In some ways, like everyone, but in other ways, a pretty unique breed.</p>