Looking at a photo for more than ten seconds

<p>As long as the original subject is wandering, here's one of my own pics that I look at or muse over for over 10 sec. Having been a street musician, I relate to a disenfranchised man doing who knows what on a trash container behind a bus terminal. It takes me back to my former milieu, here shot from my later digs in a hyper-modern corporate office building. We see the man interrupted in his task as he ponders whether the Gap is a 'thing'.</p><div></div>

<p>I know this is un-PC to say, but Bill's picture smells.</p>

<p>Bill, context, direction and presentation is everything with images and humor. If you're going to make light of someone's well thought out point, contradiction equals confusion when it comes to communication. You're a musician like me. You should know that already.</p>

<p>I really don't get your point or your image.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Go look at a picture of someone you love; and fall in love all over again.<br>

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br>

We're mostly in love with the idea of being in love. We're in love with the story in which we play the starring role. Photography as a sentimental journey ( the only worthwhile photography ) isn't about truth, it's about our idea of what should be true.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>=====================================================</p>

<p>I was thinking Phil if your and my comments apply to selfies?</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Forget about context.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Including the context of Bill's first introduction of the image as something of serious importance to him enough to look at it more than ten seconds as a keeper while reducing it to a "Far Side" cartoon in order to <em>zing</em> me and my point about "The Gap"?</p>

<p>I couldn't make out a pen in his image, Phil. It's so blurry I can't even tell what's in the dude's hands. </p>

<p>Sorry for offending you Tim, I did rather cavalierly link my post to the context. I thought my joke reinforced your point (which in my mind amounts to the Gap is for fetishists). Sounds a bit like jazz with that in mind maybe?<br>

Julie, not sure what 'smells' is about? </p>

<p>Phil, your chosen picture brings up an interesting issue for me. I've seen that picture so many times that I can't remember how I looked at it the first time, on its own merits. I now know so much history about it -- about Edward, about Charis, about the day it was taken, they were on the Guggenheim project, climbing a mountain (thus the boots) with Ansel and the mosquitoes were <em>incredibly</em> terrible (thus the thing tied around her head). She was exhausted, Adams was exhausted, weather was about to happen there's Edward not slowing down one bit, <em>taking her picture</em>. Further, when they got back to Ansel's that night, ate and were falling asleep, his darkroom caught on fire.</p>

<p>All that history makes me not see the picture. A pedant like me is never going to suggest that knowing more about works of art is in any way a bad thing, but it's interesting to think about the ways in which it can be a distraction rather than a help in simply seeing the thing.</p>

<p>How much, or in what way, is seeing right through a picture (without really seeing the picture itself) a good thing? Blowing right by it en route to history. Allen doesn't fall in love with the picture -- he goes right through it into something/somewhere else without even seeing the picture at all. Barthes's mother does nothing for or to me; Proust's madeleine does nothing to/for me. But I'm not sure how much Barthes even sees the <em>picture</em> (itself) of his mother at all.</p>

<p>[Edward or William with your wife: Edward's women were already naked. That kind of makes a difference. In addition, I'm pretty sure the women were at least as aggressive as Edward in all of his relationships. Definitely true with Charis, at least.]</p>

<p>Bill, 'smells' is just about how the picture works on me. The picture (due to the way you've processed it) seems to have an unclean, f***-you, man-odor to it. Rank, dried-sweat, street perfume. Part of his leather coat, ring-on-middle finger way of getting up your nose.</p>

<p>Thanks for the juicy detail Julie. The pic was shot at an angle through tinted glass.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>I thought my joke reinforced your point (which in my mind amounts to the Gap is for fetishists).</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Which confirms my frustrations I didn't communicate effectively my point about the Gap image further fueling the tone of my response to you, Bill. I'm over it. We hit a wrong note in our verbal improvisation on this subject, a subject I can't stop thinking about thanks to Julie.</p>

<p>I'm going to make another attempt at it. I was hoping to make aware the ways of changing the motivation why one would look at a photo for more than ten seconds with context, presentation and direction so the Gap photo could be shot so it's not viewed as mere sexual titillation for fetishists.</p>

<p>For instance if the Gap subject was presented as a photo of a sculpture then it would help connect with the viewer seeing it as more intimate relationship between the creator of the sculpture and the subject presented that goes beyond just another depiction of a freakish female body shaming standard and cosmetic augmentation. In its current TMZ style shot of a model in a bathroom it could be given a lot more dignity and class through better presentation and context. You'ld definitely be looking at it more than ten seconds, just for different reasons.</p>

<p>Although I make fun of fetishism, I don't want to demean it. Seeing that picture changed my life (riffing again), but in such a personal way that discussion seems superfluous. I think the rarity of the experience transcends the other details.</p>

<p>10 seconds.</p>

<p>In our consumer, quick fix world;10 seconds a lifetime.</p>

<p>Lets try...a photo of a girl with her knickers down...</p>

<p>A photo of the latest shiny new camera....</p>

<p>5 seconds a natural or man made disaster...</p>

<p>A photo of a new tasty burger.</p>

<p>A photo of aliens landing on our planet...</p>

<p>"Eggleston has always looked like kind of a lizard to me, but not a lady-killer. Anyway, at the end of the article, the author tells that he <em>did</em> leave his wife alone with Eggleston, and his recounting of what she told him happened then made me go and look for more than ten seconds at the picture that accompanies the article of the seventy+ year old Eggleston. He sure doesn't look like a hotty to me".Julie</p>

<p>Hmm, perhaps she felt him touching her soul or maybe she felt his pocket...a pocket of fame and fortune she could join with.</p>

<p>Jackie Kennedy remarried such a man...have I sinned?</p>

<p> </p><div></div>

<p>Phil, that sounds good, but 'always' sounds too strong. And hard to find either in a lot of <a href="http://www.wikiart.org/en/wassily-kandinsky/on-white-ii-1923">abstract art</a>.</p>

<p>The interesting thing is those photos i was so impressed with and was looking at for minutes...not impressing me year later at all((</p>

<p>Phil, I think that's too reductive, yet not reductive enough (there, I'm covered :-). Is an otter batting stones back and forth on its chest about sex or death? I would go for the notion that it's all about survival, but procreation and death ignores the complexities of everyday maintenance. Things that are inherently interesting and time-consuming arise from that. Why would I consider that there could be a measurable distance between one photo and the next, and <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37855596/calculate-the-spatial-dimension-of-a-graph">spend a lot of time exploring the geometries implied by those measurements</a>? Because exploration for its own sake has proved a worthwhile strategy evolutionarily. You have to find the genitals before you can use them, mostly.</p><div></div>

<p>Bill, Phil's formula is circular and therefore meaningless.</p>

<p>If you say "What makes us look longer always comes down to two things: Eros and Thanatos,"; the next question is going to be, "What is Eros and Thanatos?" to which the answer is, "Why, Eros and Thanatos is what makes us look longer, of course!"</p>

<p>**********</p>

<p>misha mishyn, your post made me smile. So true. The pictures must be changing when our back is turned ... A nowatose becomes a thenatose.</p>

<p>I was just looking at my implementation of image analysis for making interesting qualitative associations of pictures, and using the Sift algorithm with 1k 'words' (whatever that means), I got maybe the first knockout one-two-three punch sequence I've seen, again straying from 'not your own' but at least <a href="/photodb/folder?folder_id=1093056">confined to my own folder</a> and easy to put 10 seconds into knowing that the algorithm actually matched features to pick this who-would-have-thunk sequence out of 6000 pix, 1, 2, 3 (actually at that point it was 427, 428, 429 out of 6500).</p>

<p>Added comment: Looking back, maybe Julie's comment is what made the sequence tie together for me!</p><div></div>

<p>Looking at pictures as a game makes me look at each of them less, not more.</p>

<p>I spend time on the on-the-ground-ness that ties the first pair together, and the analogous but flipped look-down of the second pair, which slows me down considerably just in the processing. Then the blind thematic range clicked in my mind, and I decided to intervene. Interesting that you consider it a game, since to me it's an objective exploration of an experimental design. But seeing the novel associations spin out at the click of the mouse, knowing they are objective best fits that I paid to calculate, is the kind of drip-drip-drip reward afforded by a game, I'll grant you. That's why my own, hand-written associator tries to dynamically vary the choice, which by dint of having a policy and responding to timing much more resembles a game, while trying to be a doglike life form. Sift's next pic is a group of those apes, by the way. It's a simple pleasure.</p>

<p>That said, I am definitely playing on every level I can, so that might detract from the pics, particularly if using them to explore objective perceptual strategies takes away from their essence, or just makes you want to see what the next one will be. As it is, I'm afraid to click 'next' now :-)</p>

<p>Bill, please stop twisting this thread into a promotion for you site. Thanks.</p>

<p>Actually I'm starting to like Allen's pictures. Talk about looking at many many samples of his work to arrive at a point where I can say that instead of where in the first couple seconds before a look away I just thought: trash.</p>

<p>Julie, please note that I didn't mention that I even had a site. E.g. the pure Sift option isn't even publicly available on it. But I will go away since I can't stop talking about my creative activity.</p>

<p>Holy smokes! They brought this back from the dead! We are risen ...</p>

<p>"Actually I'm starting to like Allen's pictures" Charles.</p>

<p>Me too.</p>

<p>But it has taken a while....methinks, its because I have to look at them for a while when editing, which usually takes a little longer the 20 seconds.</p><div></div>

<p> </p><div></div>

<p>Sweet photos, Allen!</p>