Music and Photography?

By linking the photo with the song in the way I linked it, I'm not solely making a literal connection (the inspiration does not equal the execution) but as I said also one that connects the slow monotone tempo of the music building to a more eclectic climax to the deliberate slow panning shot across the larger reveal of the whole image and it wouldn't have worked in the way it does if the music had been different.

I understand this and agree, it's not just a literal connection.

Universal communication preceding literal interpretation is a shorthand description of what art does all the time.

Since I don't think there's such a thing as "universal communication" I guess I just can't agree with this. In my mind, "universal communication" would mean communication that would be universally understood, felt, or sensed. And I don't think that's possible.

I guess what I'm saying is that "universal communication" as you've used it is not something unexplainable that is just sensed or felt and is not something that's part of a shorthand description of what art does all the time. To me, it's just an empty phrase. And the fact that you keep circling the drain with it and putting the onus on me seems to prove that.

I’ll simply repeat that I don’t know what you mean by it and now I’m quite sure you don’t know what you mean by it either. And I bid you goodnight.

I know exactly what I mean by it, even though I can't describe it. It's in my bones, it's my DNA....

 

Phil, is this what you're talking about?

 

Universal language - Wikipedia

Phil, is this what you're talking about?

 

Universal language - Wikipedia

 

Was this the language shared by humans and apes?

Before we get further and further beyond the looking glass, and having given it a little more thought, since Phil mentioned this "universal communication" in the context of trying to say his music/photo video was not just about a literal connection, maybe all he means is that there's also non-literal communication. That can be a howl, a whisper, a gesture, something non-verbal. But it's not "universal."

Also, if we are talking about the core of art, I'd use the word "expression" instead of "communication." Though art does communicate, I think it more broadly and more at its core expresses.

A smile is universal. A tear. A good cry. Laughter. We can express these things in song and photography. If done with feeling, most people will get it.

A smile is universal.

I think smiles are more expressive than communicative.

 

I don't think smiles are universal other than in a somewhat banal, cliché, Hallmark card, child snapshot, or Internet emoji sort of way.

 

What's significant about a smile's expression or ability to communicate is the context, what's behind the smile and what accompanies it.

 

I can take the same smile and light it differently, convert it to black and white, make it more or less contrasty, put a heavy shadow on it, put someone in the background doing something, or have other elements relating to it, and that smile will say and show very different things. Is it a smile of joy, of bittersweetness, of memory, of a madman for whom it's demonic, or sad? Yes, smiles can be very sad. A smile is not some isolated thing that communicates universally. Smiles, like everything else and every other symbol we might use, have contexts and relationships and their expressiveness, meaning, and communicative value and tone vary ... are not universal.

A tear.

Again. Not universal. Is it a tear of sorrow, of joy, of rage, caused by an onion, a speck of dust, a gust of wind? What?

For me, tears and smiles and many kinds of symbols don't get their power from being universal. They are powerful in that they can often be the embodiment of emotions or feelings, but always situational and dependent on other factors. Notwithstanding their lack of universality, they can have extraordinary gestural and expressive power as they become the locus or apotheosis of an array of stuff that might be going on.

Everyone is capable to understand what is meant by a 'smile' and a 'tear'

Then tell me, since we’re speaking universally and everyone understands, what is meant by tear?

Spare me your postmodern spiel.

Labeling it with an “ism” doesn’t respond to it. A tear is not a universal symbol for anything or any emotion. You didn’t answer the question everyone is supposed to understand. What does tear represent, universally? (“Universally” means in all cases.)

The fact that the tears are from someone who is in an unstoppable laughing kick has no bearing on that.

It actually has a lot of bearing on how we interpret the tears. Which is my point. You’re claiming universality, but you, yourself, are making the meaning of tears in this case CONTINGENT, rather than universal. In order to understand tears the way you want them understood, we must crop out what’s actually giving THESE tears their very different meaning. Since not all tears are alike (there’s no such thing as “universal tear”), you first have to arbitrarily make them all alike by cropping stuff out or taking context away in order to actually make them alike. Then, once you arbitrarily make all tears alike, you claim all tears are alike. But it’s because these tears are DIFFERENT from your fabricated paradigm, that you had to change them into different tears to become the kind of tears you want them to be.

Edited December 15, 2018 by The Shadow

The tears in the photo of the guy rolling on the floor laughing do not represent sadness. The only way you get them to represent sadness is by cropping it to make it a different picture. You’re not RECOGNIZING what the tears in the photo of the guy rolling on the floor represent, you’re changing the picture so the tears represent what you want them to. In that photo, the tears represent joy and laughter just as in many other photos tears represent sadness. There is no universal symbolic meaning of tears, as the hypothetical photo of the laughing man clearly shows. What’s wonderful about the symbol of tears is precisely the ambiguity which allows them to effectively represent different things, as they embody all sorts of emotions. Tears, indeed, are a moving and important symbol, but not because they have a universal meaning. It’s because they become the visual embodiment of different emotions in different situations. And in some photos, tears are ambiguous enough that they act more as a question mark than a definite representation of a particular emotion.

 

I can say first hand that I’ve heard a lot of interpretations of the tear in this photo. There has been no universal understanding of the tear or the photo and to me, that’s what gives the tear as symbol its power in this photo. To me, the tear is encouraging a narrative, indistinct as that narrative may be and as open as it may be, but the tear is not providing universal meaning or feeling. The tear is a symbol because it’s the embodiment of something emotional for people, a wide variety of things for different people, not because it means the same thing to everyone.

 

The tear when used as an expression of sorrow might be universally understood as such (though I’m sure some people would think of something else at times), but the tear is not always used as an expression of sorrow, as the photo of the laughing man shows. Tears shown a certain way will more or less universally represent sorrow, but tears shown other ways will represent something else.

 

You started this part of the conversation by emphasizing the non-literal, which I can relate to. Unfortunately, you’ve moved in a very literal, concrete and uncreative, non-artistic direction. Symbols like letters of the alphabet and musical notes have more concrete and literal meanings. Symbols in photography and art don’t, IMO. That most kids would say tears mean sadness is not persuasive to me of the power tears can have in the artist’s hand to represent not just sadness but joy, awe, rapture and a host of other things limited only by the photographer or artist’s creativity and the viewer not being locked into a pre-determined mindset. When The Band sings Tears of Rage, they are using the tear to symbolize something very different from sadness. Those viewers who see rapture in the tear in the above photo are allowing themselves to move beyond childhood storybooks and into a different realm.

 

I can recognize that, at a simple and basic level, kind of a third-grade level or so, tear symbolizes sadness. But that’s not the extent of a tear’s symbolic power, which is actually quite unlimited and can’t always be imbued with a literal meaning such as “sadness” or “rapture.” The tear in art often operates non-literally and the feelings a tear in art can invoke or represent are not so limited or concrete.

Edited December 15, 2018 by The Shadow

That's too complicated for me. When you see your child or friend smile and exude contentment, isn't that enough? Don't you then in turn smile in happiness for them? That's communication. What words have to be spoken? Isn't that what we try to do with photography. A great portraiture or street shot does that. A great landscape shot communicates awe. Good photography communicates feelings.

When you see your child or friend smile and exude contentment, isn't that enough?

Enough for what?

Don't you then in turn smile in happiness for them?

If someone smiles in happiness, I might empathize with their happiness. And, yes I might smile back at them in kind. If someone smiles at me on the subway, it might simply be a greeting or acknowledgment and mean nothing like happiness to see me. I might smile back at them somewhat perfunctorily or, if I find them sexually attractive, I might smile back flirtatiously. If someone smiles while working hard, I might take it as a sign of struggle and most likely would not return it. Again, I’m not saying smiles don’t have some pretty specific meanings that most of us can often discern. They just don’t have a universal meaning that applies to all smiles.

That's too complicated for me.

I don’t find tears or smiles having different meanings or being used in different ways all that complicated. But if it is a little complicated, so what? Does everything discussed on the Internet have to be solved in a sound-bite? Is there no longer room in a discussion of photography, music, art, and symbols for even a little complexity or something a little deeper than the simply smiling Jane in the book we learned to read with? Maybe it’s time for a thread on what’s wrong with complexity, complication, nuance, detail, and depth of thought. Would be a funny question to ask in a Philosophy forum.

i don’t think anyone here is being or trying to be profound. I think we’re discussing symbols and how they work, and that’s not necessarily a simple thing to discuss. At least, that’s all I meant. I can’t help how others interpret it, just as I can’t help, nor would I want to, how others are going to interpret a tear in any given photo.

 

By the way, what do you think the tear in my photo says, since you seem so certain of its singular symbolic meaning? I can assure you, whatever you say will not be universal, which is probably why you’ll dodge the question.

The fact that the tear was the result of the wind was just a backstory and was not meant to reduce the symbolic role it plays in the photo. No matter how it came about, I seized on it for its symbolic potential, not its supposedly pre-determined meaning of sadness or its supposedly universal interpretation. It’s an embodiment of emotion and I can say what emotion it stirs up for me but I’ll be damned if I’m going to speak for all viewers.

By the way, I’m by no means saying that a photographer can’t lead people toward certain emotions and use a lot of photographic tools to do that. In another photo, a tear might definitely point to sadness, and it might, for some, in this one. But I think it’s much more ambiguous here because of a lot of factors, including that it’s working alongside another symbol, the cross. It’s still working symbolically, just much less distinctively and not necessarily toward sadness at all, at least for me.

 

I very often make intentional photographic moves and use symbols to convey fairly specific ideas or emotions, just as I can do with lighting and contrast. But none of that means that such lighting or contrast or symbolism has a universal meaning, a meaning that will apply in all cases. It means, in THIS case, it will convey a particular emotion or at least emotional direction. But in another photo, that same kind of lighting or that very same symbol can convey a very different emotion, idea, or direction.

Stating and recognizing that tears are a universal symbol for sorrow (and not for joy) isn’t saying that all viewers will experience sorrow and its expression the same way, or that it won't elicit unique individual memories.

You're right. It's not saying that at all. It's simply saying that the tear is a universal symbol for sorrow, which it's not, as proven in all the instances when a tear doesn't symbolize sorrow and symbolizes something else.

 

I'm glad you responded to the cross/tear photo as you did and very much appreciate that you think the tear has a redemptive sorrow. You may or may not be interested to know that people have seen the tear very differently, having nothing to do with sorrow. Because YOU respond a certain way doesn't make it universal. Again, I think your response is genuine and heartfelt. It's not, however, the universal response, nor would I have expected it to be. And, just as it's not the universal response, it's not the universal meaning of the tear in that photo, because there is none.

whether or not it's an actual cross is beside the point

Yes. Whether or not it's an actual cross is beside the point. Because the cross is a symbol, and a symbol stands for or brings to mind something, any cross can stand in for the Christian symbol, in context. A railroad cross, of course, usually does not. That cross is a symbol for something else. And, yes, that's in part because the cross is on a very different angle, though if we saw what otherwise would seem to be a Christian cross (hinted at by context) in the very same position as we usually find a railroad cross, we still might interpret it with a religious flavor.

 

Nothing IS without a context in which it's found. That's just life.

If we find an old railroad crossing sign, minus the sign part, just the two pieces of wood in the shape of a cross, lying by the side of some abandoned railroad tracks, most would take it as the symbol denoting a railroad crossing. Some might think, too, of the religious symbolism crosses have. If we take that same two pieces of unmarked wood, not recognizable as a railroad crossing sign by anything other than the location in which we found it, and put it on the ground next to a church and photographed it, or went to empty field and stuck it into the ground, it might very well take on religious symbology for a lot of people. The very same symbol seen or photographed in very different circumstances has very different meaning and feels very differently. It is not a universal symbol, even though it can be a very powerful one. I maintain it's a lot more emotionally powerful when associated with religion or faith, but it's a symbol nevertheless when posted at a railroad intersection. It is context dependent, not universal.

Yes, and I guess A can mean B and B can mean C and nothing has any real conventional meaning at all. We can all just interpret everything and anything on a whim and personal choice.

No, not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying interpretation is not necessarily whimsical at all, but is not solely determined by a singular symbol. It's determined by symbols, contexts, backgrounds, gestures, shading, etc. We humans can take a lot into account, and we do. Things do have conventional meanings, and those conventional meanings tend to vary within different contexts. That's why a cross can have such a variety of meanings. If you saw two pieces of wood crossed at a railroad intersection and you said that symbolized working out at the gym, most people wouldn't understand you and you'd have a lot of explaining to do. But, if you said it symbolized that this was once an active railroad crossing, most people would get it. If you took that same cross into a church and hung it somewhere appropriately, especially if it was an old church with not many modern ornaments, it would be pretty whimsical to claim the cross in that environment symbolized the presidency of the United States. Because of its context, it would be much more likely that most people would interpret it religiously.

Then, of course, you could cross your fingers or your eyes and start a whole new line of thinking ...

 

[Tongue in cheek, not analogous, I know!] :)

 

:) Now there's a smile I can count on.