Adrift

<p>I am fascinated by transitions and in-between spaces.</p>

<p>For a while, I loved The Grateful Dead. I've written philosophically about their predilection to explore borders, a world between here and there, in and out, even life and death. Often their musical transitions are greatly extended, so that the transition itself becomes the place of wonder rather than where it's going or from whence it came. One of my favorite of their songs leads to a repetitive chorus and an extended musical romp on the Rio Grande, a place to get lost, to be, to be on our way even as we're not necessarily getting anywhere.</p>

<p>We've recently been touching on the ability to transgress the frame of photos. Well, even within a photo and within a body of work, there are transitions that flow rather than divide distinctly, that we create in order to explore rather than simply to distinguish. Soft lines at the edges of our figures can suggest something quite different from sharper-focused edges. Foreground elements can blend with backgrounds and background elements can come forward, <em>moving our eyes</em> in such a way as to involve us less in a distinction of back and front and more in a tumult of appearing and disappearing grounds. Gradation -- of color, of tone, of light -- can suggest a flow, a flux, rather than a discrete division.</p>

<p>Fluidity in photographs can involve me personally because it can supply less definition and more suggestiveness, less clarity and more breadth, less indicativeness and more implications. The frame, as has been said, can act as a figurative (rather than a literal) border. It can be penetrated and gone beyond. So can seeming distinctions within a photo. The <em>movement</em> from light to dark, from this plane to that, can create continuities that sustain us for their own sakes, visual tangents upon which to dwell . . . placid, stirring, even disquieted. And the line between content and form can be blurred when form allows content to seep outside its bounds.</p>

<p>There exists a photographic journey without borders. It is an invitation.</p>

<p>As <em>photographer</em>, I can be deliberate, intentional, and purposeful in creating such suggestiveness. I can create the space to explore. The <em>viewer</em> will go where she will, grounded by the space I provide and able to transcend that ground via her experience and imagination.</p>

<p>These are considerations I am drawn to and find myself coming back to in my approach to making photographs. Some will likely prefer more distinctiveness and a sharper focus. How do each of us contemplate such porous borders, edges (not just of the photo but of elements within it), transitions, relationships of all sorts in our photos and in our work overall? Do you like being in or out . . . and do you sometimes stand on the threshhold and breathe in the air? </p>

<p>Beautifully, beautifully written, Fred. I have so many things to say ... I will start with an important and practical point that I think might usefully ground this subject at its beginning.</p>

<p>I will claim that what Fred has just described is <em>in no way</em> a departure from a reality. He has described the <em>default way</em>, the <em>natural</em> way, that we see. Photographs present us with unnatural vision to which we have become acclimated by saturation exposure.</p>

<p>We never see everything in a scene in perfect sharpness all at once. And we never see a single plane of sharp focus. Rather we see an aggregatate of sharp areas of interest, accumulated by the eye/mind's scanning of what's there, and we are always (obviously) in the scene.</p>

<p>A fixed-focus, single-focus scene that is discontinuous from our own body is something that we have been trained to understand; it's not our natural condition. The way the camera sees; "its" vision, "its" photographs are not how we naturally see the world.</p>

<p>To the extent that a photographer can move from rigidity to fluidity in focus and boundaries, he is moving from camera-vision toward human-vision.</p>

<p>If you are curious to see what multiple points of focus might look like in a photograph (as opposed to the single <em>plane</em> of focus that you get with your camera) here are two composites. The first has nine points of focus:<br>

<a href="http://unrealnature.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/sd_1481.jpg">http://unrealnature.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/sd_1481.jpg</a><br>

The second has eight points of focus:<br>

<a href="http://unrealnature.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/sd_1409.jpg">http://unrealnature.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/sd_1409.jpg</a><br>

(Please note: as Fred has pointed out, there are many ways besides focus to make a picture more fluid.)</p>

<p><strong>Fred rhapsodized - "</strong> do you sometimes stand on the threshhold and breathe in the air?"</p>

<p>Yes, right before leaping.</p>

<p>While there is a vast, Sagan-esque billions and billions of possibilities, they are not without number or limits to begin with, and in the end, we wind up with <em>one</em> image, which still bears traces of its ontogeny and ontology. It is an awesome thing to make and/or behold.</p>

<p>It was fascinating to see Julie running interference for Fred here. In my opinion, his post does not need grounding, though it comes closer to achieving escape velocity than most, which is probably why Julie jumped in. It's the typical, recognizable Fred we know and love.</p>

<p><strong>Julie - "</strong> Photographs present us with unnatural vision to which we have become acclimated by saturation exposure."</p>

<p>For a city dweller, one of the things that drives home the relativity of ways of seeing is to go into the desert. Long vistas, less familiar signifiers of scale. There's the story of the man on a bus tour who decided to spend a lunch stop looking around. He saw a little promontory that seemed a mile or so away and set off towards it. It was several miles away, far larger than he imagined and he became lost. He was rescued later that evening, completely bewildered by the experience. I have experienced this firsthand (sans rescuing) during week-long desert treks, and very similar experiences while kayaking.</p>

<p>If a human is born in a dense jungle, his nature and the way he sees is different from that of an Inuit Eskimo or someone living in craggy mountains. All native, all different, none unnatural. And this is without taking into account sociological factors. For humans born into the world wallpapered by man-made imagery, then that is their (and our) nature and native vision.</p>

<p>Of course, photographers and artists are immersed into other aspects of images as well.</p>

<p>I would also submit that while I understand what Julie meant, there is no camera vision. They are inert objects, incapable of seeing.</p>

<p>I just realized Julie posted while I was, and wanted to comment on this picture:</p>

<p>http://unrealnature.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/sd_1481.jpg</p>

<p>One of the challenges of working this vein is how to prevent this from decaying into a parlor game for the viewer of simply decoding Julie's compositings. These already walk the loose tightrope of contrivance, and work best when they also incorporate artistic vision, as this one does. I am personally not particularly moved by the sleight-of-hand per se, but its human measure. In this picture, there is a horizontal spiral (radial symmetry on its side, no less, which is somewhat unusual) defined by the lighter-toned bird that curves to the viewer left, along the other brown birds culminating in the one spreading its wings in a display, landing or take-off.</p>

<p>The foreground bird is emphatically breaking the fourth wall, the nearest one on the left is also, though to a lesser degree, lessening as we go to the end bird, which is looking at the ground, seemingly immersed in the image. The three verticals create subframes which encapsulate groups of birds, tying the first and last. That last one spontaneously breaks symmetry, strengthening the composition and just as significantly, seems to pay hommage to the foreground bird. The plane of focus of the upright to viewer's right (and that little sundial-like strip of grass) emphasizes that symmetry break. This comes across to me as a self-referential allegory (very Pomo) for for what is going on in the picture and our lives as well. Well done.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Luis G:</p>

<blockquote>

<p>It was fascinating to see Julie running interference for Fred here.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>*<em>hanging my head</em>*<br>

Guilty as charged. I was being just a teeny-weeny bit preemptively protective. (Damn! Am I that transparent?)<br>

Thank you for your comments on my picture. Greatly appreciated -- and highly valued.</p>

<p><strong>Julie - "</strong> Damn! Am I that transparent?"</p>

<p> We all are. :-)</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Well, even within a photo and within a body of work, there are transitions that flow rather than divide distinctly, that we create in order to explore rather than simply to distinguish.<br>

How do each of us contemplate such porous borders, edges (not just of the photo but of elements within it), transitions, relationships of all sorts in our photos and in our work overall? Do you like being in or out . . . and do you sometimes stand on the threshhold and breathe in the air?</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Yes, the way the photographs are carried out <em>and</em> carried on with. For me it's as much about perfecting the imperfection as it's about making the imperfect perfect. It's the neither being in nor being out, but the balancing act between those two that give the motive and <em>movement</em> for something transitory, between elements that make the photograph and between the record of experiences that make the photographer.</p>

 

<p>"It's the neither being in nor being out, but the balancing act between those two that give the motive and <em>movement</em> for something transitory, between elements that make the photograph and between the record of experiences that make the photographer." (Phylo)</p>

<p>Thanks, Phylo. I was starting to write a long appreciation on my thoughts of this theme, but you have said most of what I wished also to say in a much shorter space. With the stimulus of Fred's thought-provoking essay, you have touched upon a basic "raison d'etre" for many of us who aspire to use our photography to attempt an enhanced and hopefully significant communication with the viewer.</p>

<p>The New York Times had a news article about the body in our thinking <a href=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/science/02angier.html?scp=1&sq=brain%20body%20&st=cse> which may be pertinent to this.</a> Basically, we move our ideas (links in the article to the study itself). The article talks about embodied cognition, the idea that the brain is not the only part of us with a mind of its own.</p>

<p>With paintings, perhaps we put ourselves in the brush gestures, what the artist's body was doing. With photography, perhaps we put ourselves in a generally more passive position? Not sure. The viewer is always active and is always a body in space.</p>

<p>It need not be what culture one is born into or what geographical region one is raised in that helps determine perception. An interesting anecdote about 'being trained' to see was brought home to me in a class I taught where I assigned students to have young children look at advertising photos in magazines and report what they saw. Several responses were that "I can see the shadow of the photo on the other side of the page through the paper." How's that for 'porous boundaries'?</p>

<p>My greatest photographic pleasure entails wandering attention (partially, if not substantially a physical experience rather than conceptual...feedback from eye muscles). I like photos with multiple points of interest, am bored by simple images. I like portraits like Newman's or Brandt's, when the subject is off center, or nominally centered-subjects when I realize that my attention is being drawn here and there despite the primative layout. I like Renoir a great deal, perhaps especially because I can wander in his images, am bored by comic surrealists such as Dali, who content themselves with a handful of sharply defined jokes.</p>

<p>Though not necessarily soft-edged, my taste for "wandering attention" may echo, or even embody, <strong>Fred's</strong> soft-edged "movement" and "visual tangents upon which to dwell" (seeing is muscular as much as conceptual)...his interest in "suggestiveness" seems like my preference for questions rather than answers...there's pleasure in both search and consciousness of non-search, and that pleasure is certainly muscular as well as cognitive...the eye and brain wander, straining to see more due to soft edges or just "stand on the threshold" (meditatively or resting).</p>

<p>Physical feedback (muscles in body and eyes) is is received 24/7, with or without cognition.</p>

<p>I think it's a mistake to confuse physical feedback (as when exploring a puzzling image or scene) with cognition ("wondering"). Both provide pleasure and pain, and both can be boring.</p>

<p>When I was first attracted to the early <strong>André Kertész</strong> work I struggled to understand what I was seeing. A book collected a specific phase of his photography. The vintage subject matter and phototechnical craft were attractive, but something else had hooked me.</p>

<p>Eventually I realized that he was constructing virtual stage sets, often of a limited depth, perhaps no more than 10M...though he often dealt with much more distantly separated points of interest (eg a transparent clock face with far distant city)... something was going on at the extremes, near and far, as well as in-between. Plenty of room to wander, nothing wasted, and "composition" was of course automatic for him: he was a story-teller, after all (photojournalist), not a mere "graphic artist."</p>

<p>[<em>Where is Fred? I am enjoying all of the responses -- but, but, but ... where is Fred</em>?]</p>

<p>I was listening to a talk about poetry this morning in which poems were described as a <em>script</em>. The speaker said that it is the reader that determines the "tone" of the "performance" of the poem. The poet can structure his poem to (strongly or not) suggest a particular tone, but it is (always) the reader, in his/her performance of the poem as script, that determines the tone.</p>

<p>The two words, <em>script</em> and <em>performance</em> seem to me to be interesting reference the topic of this thread. Is a picture a script -- to be performed by the viewer? There are obvious differences between a text that must be read, with the reader's "track" being directed. And the poem is made from language thus there is a level of decipherment. However, I do think that a picture can be thought of as a script and the viewing of it as a performance. Some pictures may simply prompt you to be still and look, but others can make you or take you or break you in two.</p>

<p>Additionally, the first poem that this speaker used as illustration was Wallace Stevens's <em>The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm</em>. That poem begins:</p>

<blockquote>

<p>The house was quiet and the world was calm.<br />The reader became the book; and summer night</p>

<p>Was like the conscious being of the book.<br />The house was quiet and the world was calm.</p>

<p>The words were spoken as if there was no book,<br />Except that the reader leaned above the page,</p>

</blockquote>

<p>The bit, "as if there was no book" -- does that happen with photographs? Does the "thing," the picture, vanish? Can you (the viewer) disappear into it? Do you (the photographer) want that or do you wish for the viewer to see the "thing"?</p>

 

<p>Though this idea of in-between has been on my mind since the days of term papers and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owsley_Stanley">Owsley</a>, considering it relative to photographs is new for me. The danger of achieving escape velocity is great (thus my delay, Julie), and I have to be a bit stream of consciousness, since I have not yet brought it into focus for the visual realm near as much as I have for music.</p>

<p>A place for me to start is with <em>direction</em>.</p>

<p>I see myself pointing. In photos. Also being pointed to. I've talked a lot about the importance of "relationship" in creating a portrait but there is a very physical (thanks, John) directionality I often <em>see</em> in a photo. My perspective and focus seem to send me out in whatever direction, toward the subject. The subject's body language can move my eyes (and feelings), his eyes (gaze) can cause my own to follow. In that respect, the eyes can be a window into the soul (thanks, Immanuel) and they can also be a compass, providing a loose road map to the scene. The light coming into the eyes . . . from some direction . . . can make me aware of their passivity, absorbers of soul as well as indicators of it. The eyes can <em>act</em>, projecting that soul into the rest of the frame and outward toward me.</p>

<p>I like working with two subjects, which allows for both harmonious and opposing (sometimes both at once) gestures, glances, and directional pulls. This <em>moves</em> my eye (and my imagination) as photographer and viewer. A visual dynamic is set in place that may pull the viewer along or may push the viewer out even while something else beckons her back in. When there are two or more -- as in Julie's multiple points of focus -- there is more space in between. Can I achieve a level of participation in the non-focused aspects of the photograph? There's the space between me and the photograph and the spaces internal to the photograph, between this and that.</p>

<p>Is some participation more direct (mine, as both photographer and viewer, with the photograph . . . and mine, as both photographer and viewer, with the subject) and some participation more vicarious, when I get caught up in the motion of objects with each other, light's relationship to dark, geometric dynamics themselves, focal pulls?</p>

<p>Darkness/shadows is probably the one I've been most drawn to since I started shooting. The shadows, the corners, are the places where I can linger and achieve a great amount of depth. And not in a way that my eyes will even necessarily be drawn to those spaces but rather they will find themselves there. The subject's eyes may blatantly engage the viewer while the shadows can demurely flirt, sometimes even swallowing me whole. Just as I'm about to drown, the eyes become the life rings.</p>

<p>Highlights are becoming more of a challenge, to act as shadows do.</p>

<p>______________________________________</p>

<p>My standing on a threshhold can be as tumultuous as Alice's fall down the rabbit hole.</p>

<p>An actor on stage listening approaches infinitesimal nuance, often foregoing obvious demonstrative gesture. Such listening is active. It does not simply wait. It projects anxiety, patience, receptiveness, what it does not know . . . yet.</p>

<p>I wonder if I turn "moment" or "instant" into "scene" as a way of projecting the in-between I'm talking about.</p>

<p>If it is a moment, it is a moment in time, between then and when. The instant is fixed, seemingly rigid.</p>

<p>The scene unfolds.</p>

<p>The Grateful Dead improvised every time they lulled me to and fro in the rockin' waves of the river. As photographer, I can improvise, but then it's set . . . by the time you see it, there it stands, less yielding than the strumming of a guitar.</p>

<p>I, photographer, can set in motion your own improvisation.</p>

<p>I exist and the shutter is clicked in-between. Between subject and me, between then and to be.</p>

<p>Each photo I make is itself my transition and your exposition. (I don't explain . . . you do.)</p>

<p>The photo is the transition. The photo is in-between.</p>

<p>[<em>Julie, you posted as I was finishing up my thoughts. I think we've got common ground in your script and performance and my transition and exposition.</em>]</p>

<p>As I read the original post, I came to think how I can have this with other people's photos (and paintings, and sculptures to a lesser extend), but not with my own photos. As much as I can try to frame subjects close to the frame edge to imply a world beyond the frame, I've seen that world... somehow I do not forget what I saw myself; my own photos do not come loose from my own memories.</p>

<p>And as I was thinking how one could phrase nicely what happens as a <em>viewer</em>, I found that Julie already said it quite nicely, and Fred's last post underlines that.<br>

I like the script versus performance notion, hugh there is also another take on it maybe: as an overture (without the actual opera): it gives me the subjects, a hint of the story, a setting, and the rest is up to me, as viewer with imagination, to fill.</p>

<p>Then again, sometimes the weirdest things can kickstart imagination... so as a photographer, how much can you control such responses? (or don't want to control that?)</p>

<p>I think Fred's very original approach to a photograph has the potential to take one on a very different and personal course away from whatever a photographer might think he/she put into the work. It strikes me as the kind of observation someone trained to appreciate abstract art might bring wherein the point of view would be that any part of the image might be made significant by paying attention to it. Not so much significant for what it is, but rather where it takes you. And why not? What an interesting perspective!</p>

<p>Wouter asks an important question for the photographer to wrestle with about the intentionality of images. Whereas language and pigment are manipulated with tools that leave imprints the artist can control along with everything else, the photographer's tool are more awkward and intrusive. Fred unfetters his mind and responds to details in a picture that perhaps couldn't be helped. This isn't to negate anything, but rather it might occur to a photographer to "up the ante" by making sure elements appear in a picture that would make it more likely for Fred (or someone of like mind) to have the sort of experience he has described so well. But how reasonable is this? Couldn't the photographer back himself into a corner whereby he would assert that part of his picture is intentionally blurry for its soaring suggestibility and another part happens to be just as blurry because that's what the camera saw and it couldn't be fixed?</p>

<p>I think in the end that it is impractical for the photographer to work overly hard to be of two minds at the same time: image maker and viewer. Surely photographs are routinely manipulated for one reason or another, but the viewer often has little first-hand knowledge of the history of the particular image before him. I believe it would be impossible to anticipate the reaction and experience of a viewer like Fred due to the very different nature of the creativity he brings to a picture entirely on his own. Perhaps the wisest course of action to take is to assume most viewers are this way, so that one works to satisfy himself and his client.</p>

<p>It's definitely true that strange things can stimulate the imagination. A crack in the windshield of a car I had several years ago allowed me to think like a two dimensional "flatlander" for a while as I asked myself whether or not I would be aware of the changes in direction in the crack's path. I decided that I would not. As a flatlander, I would be only be able to sense a plain as perfectly flat because it would be no deeper at a corner or intersection than anyplace else. Hence I would have no mental vocabulary to use to detect the orientation of any part of my flat universe in a three dimensional model. In fact, I would not even suspect that such a thing might exist. I was working on a theory of dimensionality at the time and I concluded that a dimension introduces something invisible and beyond the experience of objects in the dimensions it encompasses. </p>

<p>The foregoing thoughts were well and good, though it's important to remember that they're constructions of words...not photographs, perhaps not even photographic.</p>

<p>Many fear to consider photography a domain with its own virtues, parallel to poetry or dance. Many insist on calling "it" "art" ...demonstrating that they don't think their photography can stand on its own. It needs a moustache and beret lest it's thought to be mere postcard or motel decor. When a lily needs gilding, what does that tell us?</p>

<p>Some writers make a virtue of clarity. Most don't. It seems to me that the clear writers are closer to photography than writers who intentionally sound writerly. Clarity is generally thought to be a virtue in photography, whether it's focused or defocused. That's less the case with writers, whose prose is mostly "prolix" (per Catch 22). It's be Good, in the absolute sense, if photographers got a copy of Elements of Style (Strunk & White) with their cameras.</p>

<p>In his OT Fred said "a photographic journey" is available, "an invitation." Yes. Of course. That's also true of bowling or egg frying. We distance ourselves from a photographic journey by insisting that photography is instead "art"....as if distinctly non-art camerawork is not photography, or student work is art (student work is rarely art IMO). </p>

<p>Someone who does a good job shooting shoes for a catalog has more Virtue in the most classic sense than someone who apes someone who apes someone who apes someone...as in wannabe Ansels, temporarily snapping rocks and trees and sunsets.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Good heavens, John, you will shake up all the writerly writers and lovers of the multi comma and multi adjective phrases. But thanks for the lesson in the usefulness of physical gravity and the power of expressive clarity (and its accompanying noble simplicity).</p>

<p>Arthur, you're right, as usual.</p>

<p>One beret-wearer was so shaken-up that he threatened me this evening by email. Evidently this Forum represents a journey, fearful and yet-untaken for some of us :-)</p>

<p>It's evidently hard to accept that "art" isn't as high an aspiration (post Warhol, not incidentally) as is "good photograph" or "clear expression." </p>

<p>Some self-anointed photographic "artists" are better photographers than they know, confused as they are by their berets and moustaches.</p>

<p>If form is not experienced as a <em>container</em>, the transcending possibilities start to become apparent. We tend to think of the shape the story takes, but in those all-important in-between spaces and moments -- those times when we lose the focus of where we're headed -- there is a dream-like extraordinariness, unshaped by the grounds we're used to.</p>

<p>One of the typical aspects of form is boundaries. Content can, I think, start breaking down this way of experiencing form. The content does make those boundaries more porous, more transgressible. The content can wear the form thin. The story makes the form more malleable and it can seem almost to overwrite the form. When the container seems unwilling or unable any longer to contain, there's room for <em>instinct</em>, an intimate grasp of something most often undefinable. It can make me more willing, both as photographer and as viewer.</p>

<p>_____________________________________</p>

<p>In the mid seventies, when they were at their musical peak, the Dead travelled with a "wall of sound," a massive three-tiered speaker system created for power and to <em>envelop</em> the audience in the music.</p>

<p>One of the reasons Bill Graham said "They're not the best at what they do...they're the only ones who do what they do" is because the Dead had a unique way of seamlessly transitioning from one song to another. They connected songs by decomposing and deconstructing the chords and melody from one, musically hanging out for a while in that in-between space, and then slowly and ever-so-uncertainly beginning to create, as if from out of a chaotic void, the melodic structure necessary to slowly mold the next melody in the unbroken chain.</p>

<p>One passed through the borders never really feeling like they crossed the line to the next song. The story became unbounded. The form seemed less articulated.</p>

<p>_____________________________________</p>

<p>Albert, thanks so much for your many acknowledgments and the riffs you've added. By way of clarification, for me as photographer, it's a matter of maintaining and building upon an <em>awareness</em> of the viewer and the viewer's potential reactions and not a matter of <em>controlling</em> those responses. If the photo is the in-between (the place between me and the subject, the time between then and when), then I am happy to give that in-between to the viewer, a place where his feet don't have to touch the ground, a bit of the chaos of the void.</p>

<p>I think Alan G. made a great point about "porous borders" in his story about the kids seeing the photos in the book as somewhat transparent, casting shadow onto subsequent pages. It reinforces the idea that there really <em>is</em> no photo. Or at least no singular and pure photo. Because every photo I view is dependent to an extent on context. We view in a book, framed on a wall, under lighting conditions, affected by frame of mind, one photo perhaps adjacent and therefore influenced by another, as part of a series, or as part of a body of work, or in a show that includes other photographers. There is no photo-in-a-vacuum. So there is a natural porousness to the bounds of each photo, to where the photo ends and its context encroaches.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>because the Dead had a unique way of seamlessly transitioning from one song to another. They connected songs by decomposing and deconstructing the chords and melody from one, musically hanging out for a while in that in-between space, and then slowly and ever-so-uncertainly beginning to create, as if from out of a chaotic void, the melodic structure necessary to slowly mold the next melody in the <strong>unbroken chain</strong>.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Like the 90 minute single shot in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J--TDEHizVA">Russian Ark</a>, where the content is and becomes the form and vice versa ? One of my favorite records, Misplaced Childhood by Marillion has no seperation between the songs either and they all transition into each other as one piece of music, although not really with a decomposing and deconstructing of the chords and melody between them.</p>

<p>But photography is so inherently different, there's no possibility of "one take" <em>in</em> time, there's one photograph at <em>a time</em>, and then there's the next one. That which might connect them as a chain is something seperate from their form ( and content even ), something intangible.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Albert,</p>

<p>The lack of control of the photographer is not a drawback; it's (one of) the point(s) that Fred is embracing! That the photographer's "space" is as permeable -- breached! -- as the viewer's is why/how/when he is joined with you. His space is continuous with yours. His vision is no more boxed, or fenced, or walled, or complete or ended than is yours. He's making a picture of a space in which, through which things happen. Where things "take place."</p>

<p>Think of, for example, a train/subway station through which you might pass every day on your way to work. Or a town square or some stoplilght where you always sit in traffic. Every day it's the same but every day it's different. That's a space in which things happen; where things "take place." You remember it as having fixed properties -- which you would want to make a part of any photograph you made portraying something that happened, that "took place" there -- but it's also always in flux. That flux is necessary to fill the space, but it's not particular to that space.</p>

<p>Another example, imagine that every day, at work, you walk past the open door of an office cubicle in which sits a man or woman on whom you have a serious crush. Every day, same thing. There she or he is. That cubicle is stuffed with all sorts of stuff that changes every day and the man or woman is dressed differently, sitting differently. Every day different. The stuff doesn't matter -- but it has to be there (you can't very well have him or her naked and suspended in an empty white cubicle -- well, you can but ... oh never mind). What "takes place" is that person. But the "flux" of the continuous space which you share with him or her is what makes that daily glimpse intense.</p>

<p>On the other hand, if, one day you look in and he or she is kissing somebody else, or his or her husband or wife is there beside him or her or there's a ring on a particular finger or a ring is no longer on a particular finger, or there are gift flowers or, worst of all, he or she is gone ... then the space is changed. Something else, something new, has "taken place."</p>

<p>What I'm saying (messily) is that a photographer can rarely bar the door; and (I think) Fred is claiming, DOES NOT WANT to bar the door. He wants to open the box, not close it. We're talking "inclusive moment" not "exclusive moment."</p>

<p>A photograph should not be a prison. It's not a bug collection with dead specimens stuck on pins behind glass. Letting space overflow the frame -- both inward -- to, in and among the intended content -- and outward to the world of which it is a continuous part allows a picture to "take place."</p>

<p>Keeping the door open joins his space to yours; it's what lets you in.</p>

<p>I think most of us can agree that a novel or a photograph or a painting or a sculpture or an architecture works outside its physical constraints and outside of what it is in terms of its apparent content. That positive quality is what makes for me a good work of art. A communication of some significance with the viewer. Whether the photographer creates that "added dimension" consciously or not is unimportant to the final result (and I think it happens more often in the latter subconscious category, or a "chance" category, than we care to admit, although it may be of significance to him. It is also too easy to ascribe other meanings to a photograph once it is complete, a trap that I personally try to avoid).</p>

<p>We can put a lot of "me" into describing practically and philosophically what we are trying to accomplish. What is important, when we are lucky enough to achieve such an "added dimension" through such an approach, is the "it". Many highly successful artists have only a limited reflection on their mental process. Maybe we are less compensated by that lack of information, but I think that unfortunately it is often the case.</p>

<p>Phylo, how about if you go inside the frame? Rather than analogizing the songs to photographs, which I didn't mean to do (though I think a case could be made), how about if one sees within the frame the contents of a complete concert, blurred and extended and explored transitions and all? That's more what I was thinking.</p>

<p>To continue the discussion between Julie and Albert, there will be many things out of my control when making a photograph. I may intentionally move my camera to create motion blur and in doing so, there may be some unpredictable results which I have to make the best of (of course, there's always the option to can the photo). I may make the best exposure possible but still there may be an area of the photo that I have to compromise on. I think the process of making a photo is often a series of choices and compromises. I don't have complete control by any means. Part of my creativity is rolling with the punches and sometimes making lemonade out of lemons, occasionally coming up with a lemon meringue pie or lemon soufflé in the process. That distracting thing I didn't have time to get rid of or even notice in the background of a quick shot . . . maybe I can make it work after all. (Maybe not.) And then there are happy accidents. Something I remember about my own happy accidents is that they happen to me.</p>

<p>Phylo and Fred,</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>... there's one photograph at <em>a time</em>, and then there's the next one. -- <em>Phylo</em></p>

</blockquote>

<p>The thing, the print or the onscreen image or whatever, yes. But I will maintain that the experience of that photograph is not "one ... at a time." I see it, I consider it, I remember it, I think about it, I see it again ... and all the while I am changing. I am in different moods, different life conditions, different ages. Yes, the picture is "one at a time" but the experience of it is fluid, ongoing. It advances, it retreats, I see different things in it, feel different things from it whenever (unpredictably) it swims to the surface of my thoughts. Until and unless I forget it entirely.</p>

<p>Yes that's true, the picture taken and viewed can and does change over time. I like browsing through my negatives to discover something in them I hadn't seen before and to re-invent my intentions for taking a particular picture.35mm negatives, lots and lots of them, are a wonderful thing for just doing that...the promise of something hidden in those small frames, when peering hard enough through the latent image that's already there.</p>

<p> I think it was when I was still in school, 15 years ago or so, that I had the brilliant idea to destroy all of the negatives I had made until that point, pictures for school assignments and such. What a stupid stupid thing to do. </p>