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Pictures as occasions.


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<p>*Sometimes the concept behind these two little letters would be better if banned. ;-)</p>

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<p>Going <em>totally</em> OT, when William James was experimenting with nitrous oxide (laughing gas) he wrote notes while he was in the intoxicated state, where he describes having the overwhelming feeling "that every opposition ... vanishes":</p>

 

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<p><em>In</em>coherent, coherent — same.<br />And it fades! And it's infinite! AND it's infinite!<br />If it wasn't going, why should you hold on to it?<br />Don't you see the difference, don't you see the identity?<br />Constantly opposites united!</p>

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<p>... all of which he later dryly describes as "meaningless drivel" to the "sober reader" but it made him wonder what/where he was when he wrote those things. But he was still thinking about it (it bugged him because he was a pluralist [radical empiricist] and this kind of unified-everything smells of monism).</p>

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<p>Now a link between texture and music is a sure way of luring me out. Texture and playing with the density of texture(s) is what sets good performances apart from the technically valid ones (*).<br>

The music mentioned by Julie is a very suitable example (not only because it is written by a fellow Dutchman). The differences between the various performances is how the artist interprets the work - there is still the listener, who might be present on the life event (I think there has been a marathon Canto Ostinato in Utrecht at a time, where they played it for 24 hours straight), or via a recording. Just this week, I exchanged some parts of my stereo, and found all of my music has taken on a new life. There are new subtleties, new parts that grew denser, or more lean, new tiny elements that change the texture that I could never hear before. It's like the difference between seeing a photo on the web, or a good print. Or going from a decent print to a print done by an expert.<br>

The dialogue between artist and subject (in case of Ten Holt, choice of instruments, pace etc.) sets a scene for the listener, brings certain elements to the forefront and clouds some others. The listener depends on being perceptive to hear/see, and the presentation being done via a medium that can render the artist's interpretation to its fullest.<br>

To make a very obvious loop back to the OP. Yes, it's all dialogue to me, even if disconnected in time and space, there is plenty interaction going on. I've got too many music recorded before my birth to think otherwise.<br>

Now back to re-listening all that music!<br>

___<br>

(*) Not entirely unrelated, I can't find it online but I saw a pretty interesting interview with the violonist Gidon Kremer once where he expanded a lot on the importance on the silence between notes, and how that formed the actual sound (texture/timbre) often more than the technique used - with plenty examples to make his point.</p>

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<p>Julie, I think an insistence on content serving texture is patriarchal/hierarchical thinking that buys into a box most artists strive to break free from. James is formulating the either/or of one's having to adopt either a presumably significant and meaningful pluralism or the so-called meaningless drivel of monism. They're pretty much two sides of the same coin anyway, so for me it's a pretty fruitless opposition, one that kept philosophy busy gazing at its own navel for centuries.</p>

<p>Though William James may have been motivated by what he thought was taking a pluralist stand (when in fact I think the debate between monism and pluralism is ultimately fairly vapid) he didn't then and more surely doesn't now speak universal artistic truths. I take these strong statements by artists as important and I love them. But I also take them with many grains of salt, especially as they apply to me.</p>

<p>I think one can take a stand one way or the other in their work without needing all art to take that same stand.<br /> <br /> ____________________________________________________</p>

<p>Wouter, interesting point about silences in music, which are very much part of the music. Comparable, in some ways, to what's not in the frame that can very much still be part of the photo.</p>

We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!
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<p>Now, I can sit here arguing about monism vs. pluralism or whether it's texture serving content or content serving texture or whether dialogue is the right word or not. <strong>Or</strong>, I can give another concrete example of what the OP was asking for, psychological or symbolic attractors that draw the viewer out. (I guess I can do both!) Though I didn't think about this in advance, and this photo came together with equal parts of intention and confluence, I think two strong symbols in a photo create a kind of dialogue (or any word of your choosing) that I've witnessed viewers turned on by. Interestingly, this shot has a very pedestrian and literal story behind it, which many viewers in my company have enjoyed hearing, and which hasn't seemed to dampen the flights of fancy they still experience because it's also a photo, separated from the story of its making. Wouter, maybe in a certain sense, the mundane and literal aspects of what "really" occurred when we make a photo are part of the important silence.</p>

<p><img src="http://d6d2h4gfvy8t8.cloudfront.net/7463568-md.jpg" alt="" width="680" height="889" /></p>

We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!
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<p>Julie "Now, texture/timbre. I think that in photography, the content serves the texture and not the other way around in the same way that the instrument serves the music and not the other way around."</p>

<p>Qualia* experienced by the photographer serves up the content of the photograph. A composer's instrument renders the subjective state of the composer whether it's a camera or a pen. That subjective state may be caring or it may be not particularly caring. For a viewer, listener, or reader the situation is reversed: content serves up qualia. A composer's experience creates the thing (photograph, score, or poem) and the thing is then experienced by the viewer, listener, or reader. Anything we sense is both the sense of a thing and of the thing's associated qualia.</p>

<p>So with Fred's photograph above, the composition is the print, apparently cropped from a broader more mundane scene. Fred's approach follows Alan's method in that a character has been created in the crop. Contrast that approach with Graham's where he says of his <em>The Whiteness of the Whale</em> exhibit that he intentionally didn't intend to create characters. Instead Graham presented everyday experiences that folded around him as he captured images of tedium. However 'the quotidian' can also be viewed as a character, a characterization of lived experience as mundane, banal. Which it is a lot of the time, of course.</p>

<p>_____________<br /> *<br /> <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/">http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/</a></p>

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<p>Qualia as properties of sense data. Consider a painting of a dalmatian. Viewers of the painting can apprehend not only its content (i.e., its representing a dalmatian) but also the colors, shapes, and spatial relations obtaining among the blobs of paint on the canvas.</p>

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<p>Charles, it wasn't the original frame compared to the crop I was talking about. I was talking about how the photo came about, which was a little more mundane than where people's imaginations were taking them. Viewers were surprised and seemed pleased/amused by the fact that the tear was a result of its being such a windy day in San Francisco, whereas their imaginations had been taking them (and still seemed to take them) to different places than thinking about the wind. It is true that this is cropped but the original frame doesn't clue us into the wind factor.</p>
We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!
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<p>I should add that none of that means we (not I alone) didn't create a character. We did most of that when we were shooting. I added to that effect by cropping tight (as well as converting to b/w and processing somewhat extremely).</p>

<p>__________________________________________________________________</p>

<p>Speaking of music, the following, which you posted, seems a little cacophonous to me:</p>

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<p>Instead he with his trilogy authentically confronts the weight of the quotidian and of social inequality, not from fantasy or the privilege of some fruitless, neurotic special vision.</p>

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<p>Why are you comparing Graham to some unknown inauthentic use of fantasy and privilege and fruitless, neurotic special vision? I didn't quite get where that came in and why it came up. </p>

We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!
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<p>Still, your crop does leave a photo that isn't all that open ended?</p>

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<p>Not sure, to be honest. I could see where it would feel directed, and tight crops will often make us feel as if we're homing in on something, but I think there's room in what the two symbols together will lead to for the viewer.<br>

<br>

______________________________<br>

<br>

You didn't answer the question I asked you in my last post.</p>

We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!
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<p>Our posts crossed in the mail.</p>

<p>I think it is insensitive to Graham's work to characterize it as other than social criticism at root. His art obviously isn't intended lure the viewer away from life as it is. And I agree with Graham when he said in the interview: "And if one is seeking to touch upon that, the quality that makes people's lives, you have to deal with this great ocean of life, of everyday life around you and respecting it and giving it value and not dismissing it." (My transcription).</p>

 

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<blockquote>

<p>Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows -- a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues -- every stately or lovely emblazoning -- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colourless in itself; and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge -- pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like willful travelers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt? [<em>from</em> Moby Dick,<em> by Herman Melville; this text is quoted by Paul Graham in his book</em> The Whiteness of the Whale]</p>

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<p>.</p>

<p>***************<br>

On texture:</p>

<p>The picture -- the physical thing at which the viewer looks -- consists of a recording of visual texture.<br>

From that visual texture, the viewer, in his mind, conceives content derived from that visual texture-- which conceived content can and does change endlessly.</p>

<p>The visual texture -- the picture -- does not change.</p>

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<p>Yeah that Melville excerpt for me is hard to follow.</p>

<p>As to texture: I read you thus: the picture, the physical thing, consists of a recording of a physical thing. Substituting texture for thing doesn't add to my understanding of the recording or interpretation of a recording.</p>

<p>So I think it fairer to say that our human nature paints the thing with qualia, where qualia is what I thought you meant by 'texture'; and even Melville above seems confused about whether the quality of a thing is part of the thing or not. </p>

<p>I'm left wondering if Graham got it right when he used Melville to suggest we are in the belly of the beast. I think the better analogy is to suggest that we are on the Pequod.</p>

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<p>IMO, photographic or musical texture is not "the physical thing." It's the relationships of various elements within and aspects of the thing. And, yes, it's woven by the photographer or musician(s) and by the perceptions, understanding, and emotions of those experiencing it.</p>
We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!
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<p>Well said.</p>

<p>Sebastian Copeland, interviewed here: <a href="http://ianmasters.com/sites/default/files/mp3/bbriefing_2015_12_13c_sebastian%20copeland.mp3">http://ianmasters.com/sites/default/files/mp3/bbriefing_2015_12_13c_sebastian%20copeland.mp3</a></p>

<p><a href="http://sebastiancopelandadventures.com/home">http://sebastiancopelandadventures.com/home</a></p>

<p>Here's a photograph by Sebastian Copeland: <a href="http://sebastiancopelandadventures.com/wp-content/gallery/Arctic_n/t3z7392.jpg">http://sebastiancopelandadventures.com/wp-content/gallery/Arctic_n/t3z7392.jpg</a></p>

<p>So I think Copeland in that shot gives us something familiar to consider against a backdrop of what for me is an unfamiliar landscape. This shot could be from 10 centuries ago or from last week. Or, that dog is the one who answered Copeland's ad "Dog Wanted. Must be willing to travel." Together with that dog, Copeland becomes a six footed wonder. So the dog is a character in the photograph. Anyway, my words of the week are qualia and quotidian and my even my dog is getting sick of them.</p>

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<p>"From that visual texture, the viewer, in his mind, conceives content derived from that visual texture-- which conceived content can and does change endlessly.<br>

The visual texture -- the picture -- does not change". Julie.</p>

<p>Not sure what you mean by texture...methinks it is a word in the wrong place.</p>

<p>"the visual and especially tactile quality of a surface"...the meaning.<br>

<br>

Have to agree with Fred who has taken the words from my mouth in a more articulate use of language.... try not to agree with Fred it sort of takes away the challenge of my thoughts.<br /></p>

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<p >"Thankfully, they can also be more than hollow platitudes "Fred.</p>

<p >Indeed;)</p>

<p >The picture is from a series of "first frames". The viewer is invited to write the script"“ Every photo is the <em>first frame of a movie</em>. — <em>Wim Wenders</em>.”</p>

<p > </p>

<p >Succinctly put. Thanks for the introduction to a keen mind.</p>

<p > </p>

<p >http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/books/review/borges-on-the-couch.html?_r=0</p>

<p > </p>

<p >"I think I need a good cry...."</p>

<p > </p>

<p >Go for it. <br /></p>

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